


Death of the Author

by MaryPSue



Series: Grauntie Ford [5]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Bill Cipher Being Bill Cipher, Episode: s02e20 Weirdmageddon 3: Take Back the Falls, Family Feels, Gen, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2018-10-23 05:38:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 32,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10713309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: "Wh-why would he leave the protective barrier?" Dipper's voice rose from somewhere to Ford's right, increasing in both speed and pitch with alarm. "He did know about it, right? Why would he go out where it wasn't safe? Does this mean Bill's already figured out how to get in? But if he has, then why take Grunkle Stan and not us? Is he just playing with us now?"There was a tug on Ford’s sleeve, and she looked down to see Mabel, her brown eyes shimmering threateningly but her mouth set in determination. “We’re gonna go rescue Grunkle Stan, right?”...or, in which being a hero means fighting back even when it seems impossible, it's never too late to change, and people can always surprise you.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Man, do I love working in fic, where I don't have to adhere to a strict forty-four minute deadline or risk being eaten by Mickey Mouse in my sleep, so I can give as much space as I like to exploring interactions that canon couldn't give much screentime to.
> 
> I will probably...uh, will definitely...um, _might_ write more short fic in this 'verse, but this is the last real plotty longfic I have planned for this series. Don't let the title worry you too much; this is definitely still a fix-it fic.

It had been an unseasonably cold night, close to the end of May but feeling more like early March, an icy wind blowing off the ocean and carrying the smell of salt inland with the roiling purple clouds, until the whole world seemed to be at the bottom of a vast, dark sea. The moon peeked through cracks in the cloud cover only in slivers, lighting the tips and edges of the clouds in a fine silver filigree. Most of the illumination had come from the streetlights, casting yellow circles in the blue dark visible outside of Ford's window.

She could still remember the chill that had radiated from that window, the salt smell and hint of petrichor from the impending storm, permeating the air for feet from the slightly warped glass. The window had been as old as all of Pines Pawns, and in about as good repair, leaking cold air into the room in winter and making Stanley complain that he might as well sleep outside.

Ford had never been sure if the leaking window seal was responsible for the cold filling her chest as she'd watched her brother's duffel bag land on the sidewalk in front of him. She'd wanted to believe that. That it was only the night air, and the warp in the thick, old glass making Stanley look twisted and nearly unrecognisable, and the smell of the sea and the storm that hadn't yet broken.

Everything was different, now. But the cold feeling was exactly the same, turning each limb to immobile ice as Ford stood on the porch of the ramshackle house in Oregon, transfixed by the sight of Stanley's fez lying discarded on the lawn.

"Wh-why would he leave the protective barrier?" Dipper's voice rose from somewhere to Ford's right, increasing in both speed and pitch with alarm. "He did know about it, right? Why would he go out where it wasn't safe? Does this mean Bill's already figured out how to get in? But if he has, then why take Grunkle Stan and not us? Is he just _playing_ with us now?"

There was a tug on Ford’s sleeve, and she looked down to see Mabel, her brown eyes shimmering threateningly but her mouth set in determination. “We’re gonna go rescue Grunkle Stan, right?”

Ford tried to shake off the layer of crackling ice that seemed to have settled over her, shove the sharp-edged crystals of freezer-burned fury to the back of her mind. This was _just like_  Stanley, to go charging in headfirst without a single moment’s thought, totally overconfident, totally unprepared - how _dare_  he scare the children like this - 

She tried, but failed, to quash the chilly little thought that Stanley might already be beyond rescue.

Mabel tugged at Ford’s sleeve again, this time with greater insistence. “Grunkle Stan punched a pterodactyl in the face to save my pig. I’m not leaving him alone out there with that triangle monster!”

"He fought off a horde of zombies when they tried to eat us," Dipper agreed. "If he thought something was going to hurt us, he would've tried to fight it. That's gotta be how Bill got him out here! Great-aunt Ford, we've gotta go save him!"

The ice worked its way a little deeper in.

Ford took a deep breath, feeling frozen parts grind against each other somewhere deep within her, trying not to look down at the two hopeful faces turned towards her. "Mabel, Dipper," she started, and then faltered, the words tumbling out of their neat, ordered sentences at the way both of the children perked up. She took another breath, and tried to start again. "Stanley may not be - your Grunkle Stan wouldn't want -"

The look Dipper gave Ford was hard and too old for his twelve-year-old face. "You're saying it's impossible."

Mabel raised a hand to her chest, curling her fingers tight in the fabric of her sweater.

Ford took another deep breath, closing her eyes as she collected her thoughts. When she opened them again, it was with a smile that, thankfully, felt genuine. "From where we stand, yes, it does seem impossible. But that doesn't mean we won't try." She made sure to meet the children's eyes, trying to let the naked hope in their expressions inspire her rather than terrify her, hearing the words she'd told herself so many times over the long years between dimensions somehow strange when spoken aloud. "That's what it means to be a hero."

Mabel nodded a little, her fingers uncurling from her sweater. "Just like Grunkle Stan."

Ford stopped herself before she could speak. Everything the man had in life, he'd stolen - much of it from _her_. He ran a backwoods tourist trap, for the love of Tesla! He barely ever even wore pants!

But even if Ford disbelieved what the children had said, or thought they were exaggerating or leaving out important context - and they probably were, they both seemed to see Stanley's every word and action through rosy, admiring lenses - she herself had seen firsthand how Stanley had come running, guns blazing, through the beginnings of an apocalypse, to shoot a god of chaos point-blank in its single eye to keep his family safe.

"Just like your Grunkle Stan," she agreed. The words tasted bitter on her tongue, and Ford couldn't help the way her eyes dragged back to the fez forlornly lying in the burnt grass.

Dipper nodded, his blue and white cap bobbing. "Right. Then we're gonna need a plan."

...

"Okay. First things first, we need to know where Bill's keeping him."

"Do we have to do this with the graph paper?" Mabel complained. "I feel like I'm playing your nerd math game. And there aren't even any hot elves." 

"Mabel, please try to focus," Dipper said shortly. Mabel pouted, and started to toy with her pen. "Okay. The first place I'd look is in that creepy floating pyramid. That definitely looks like an evil lair for a megalomaniacal triangle."

"We should observe it for a while, before we try to make a move," Ford suggested. "Bill is a master of misdirection. If he does something big and obvious, it's likely that his true intentions lie elsewhere."

"So you're saying he might not actually be using the giant floating pyramid as an evil lair?" Dipper asked, and Ford nodded. 

"We should see if he enters and leaves it before we make a move against it. Thankfully, it's very visible from here. If Stanley hasn't thrown it away, I should have a telescope in the attic somewhere."

"Why do we have to do any of this?" Mabel complained, slamming both hands down on the expanse of graph paper and pushing herself to her feet. "Why can't we just...I don't know, _do_ something?"

"Mabel, we are doing something," Dipper protested. "It won't do Grunkle Stan any good if we get caught by Bill too."

"I knooooowww, I just..." Mabel flopped back down flat on the floor with an enormous sigh that seemed to suck all the air out of her, ruffling the graph paper. "I can't believe I'm just sitting here while Grunkle Stan is out there somewhere all alone, and Bill's probably doing something terrible to him right now while we're sitting around messing with graph paper and telescopes!"

"We're not just sitting here. A careful balance of action and consideration -" Ford stopped mid-sentence at the way Mabel pressed her face into the paper covering the floor. "If you'd rather be up and moving, why don't you run upstairs and find the telescope? You can start keeping a lookout, and see if you can identify the pyramid's defences and any weaknesses in them."

Mabel raised her head enough to shoot Ford a watery smile, and pushed herself to her feet. "You bet! I'm the best at getting into stuff Grunkle Stan wanted to keep us out of. I'll find that telescope in no time flat!"

Ford couldn't help but smile as Mabel took off for the stairs, a bright blur of colour. She turned back to the graph paper she and Dipper had laid out, eyeing the flat white expanse of the unknown between the novelty snowglobe of the Mystery Shack that she'd taken from the gift shop and the triangular prism from her room which was standing in for Bill's floating pyramid. "I hope Mabel can figure out how to operate the telescope. We could use a good idea of what Bill's done to the world out there, what the terrain looks like, so we know what we're facing."

"Mabel'll figure it out in no time," Dipper said, in between gnawing on his pen. “Did you know she taught herself how to make gold leaf for a scrapbooking project? Of course, she tried to make it out of Mom’s jewellery, so...”

“Hey, guys?” Mabel’s voice echoed down the stairs. “We might have just a _tiiiny_  little problem.”

Ford was about to ask what she meant, when the sound of roaring away down the lane reached her ears. It was mingled with engine noise.

She locked eyes with Dipper, and pushed herself to her feet, reaching into her coat for her molecular disruptor. Without a word, she got up and made her way as quietly as she could to the nearest window, the one she’d kept watch from while Mabel was still trapped in sleep. 

There was an enormous cloud of dust rattling up the lane. Ford caught sight of something long and spiked whipping out of it at odd intervals. She couldn’t see anything else through the cloud, but she could definitely tell that the roaring was emanating from somewhere within it.

“Get your sister and go to the basement,” she said, shortly, over her shoulder to Dipper. “I'll deal with this.”

“No way,” Dipper said, straightening up and pushing out his chest. “I’m not scared! And I’m not losing any more of my family!”

There was something fierce and determined in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders, and Ford felt something catch in her chest. There could be no doubt that she and Dipper shared so much more than Dipper and Stanley did, but - just for a moment, looking at Dipper was like looking through a time warp at her own brother, twelve and tiny but ready to take on any bully who dared to cross the Kings of New Jersey.

Ford swallowed hard around the lump that had materialised in her throat.

“I know,” she said. “Do you still have the magnet gun I gave you?”

Dipper shook his head. “I think Mabel had it, she got my backpack by accident.”

Ford rummaged around in her assorted pockets and holsters until she found what she was looking for. “Take this, head upstairs, and get your sister to help you cover the windows. Keep your heads down.”

Dipper took the weapon Ford handed him with a solemn nod. He paused a moment, taking a deep breath in, like there was something more he wanted to say, but no words came out.

Ford squared her shoulders, gathering herself up to her full height, steeling herself against her own fear. The roaring was growing closer, and she let it wash over her, memories and strategies flashing shining tails as they darted through her mind. Whatever it was, she’d almost certainly faced worse. 

She shot a smile down at Dipper, and was relieved to see he seemed to find it as reassuring as she’d meant it to be. “Let’s go show whatever that is just what kind of mistake it's making messing with us.”

Dipper shot a bright grin back to Ford, standing a little taller himself as he turned and ran out of the living room. 

Ford took another steadying breath just as the roaring stopped. The engine noise abruptly cut out as well, and in the sudden silence, Ford could all too clearly hear her own heart hammering within the cage of her ribs. 

She snuck out of the living room and down the short hallway leading to the foyer, keeping close to the wall, and pressed herself flat against the wall beside the front door, adjusting her grip on her molecular disruptor as she inched towards the door. She stopped within arm’s reach of the doorknob, waiting and listening for any other sound from outside. Was that the grinding of gears? Were those footsteps against the gravel? 

Dimly, Ford heard Dipper and Mabel’s voices echoing down from upstairs, but she was so focused on whatever was outside that she barely noticed. The hollow sounds of footsteps on the wooden steps up to the porch had consumed her attention. They came to a stop just outside the door, and Ford had the sudden, dizzying thought that only a thin wall with a little insulation stood between her and what could be certain death.

She’d faced worse, she reminded herself, as three loud knocks shook the door. 

Ford nudged the door open with her toe. Sunlight and dust filtered through the crack that opened up, and she pulled her foot back and drew away from the door as far as she dared, anticipating a shot or an explosion or some kind of curse - which didn’t come.

She raised the molecular disruptor again, and slid closer to the door, reaching out one hand to carefully pull it all the way open. Before she could get it more than halfway, though, something grabbed the door from the other side and shoved it the rest of the way open.

Ford spun on one heel, stepping around the door, planting both feet squarely in the threshold, and raising the molecular disruptor, ready to fire on whatever horrific nightmare being lay in wait. She was expecting teeth and eyes, too many of each, an assortment of limbs and pulsating organs. She was expecting the ordinary, but twisted, a horror too close to sanity to bear. She was expecting _something_ out of the darkest pits of Bill Cipher's warped imagination, come at long last to destroy her.

She wasn’t expecting to come eye-to-eye with...a hat.

Ford looked down. The hat’s wide brown brim tilted up, revealing the face of an old man, hunched forward like an animal, peering up with surprisingly sharp, if meandering eyes from behind spectacles missing one round green lens and several feet of thick white beard.

Those eyes locked onto Ford’s face, and she felt all the blood drain from it. There had been an unmistakable flicker of recognition there.

The old man straightened up, taking off his hat, and Ford took an involuntary step backwards. She suddenly felt as thought _she_  were the misshapen tangle of limbs she’d expected to find on the doorstep. She’d thought she’d known what “wrongfooted” meant, but, Ford thought, she’d never really known what it felt like until just now.

The voice that spoke out from under the beard was shaken and faint, perhaps with shock, perhaps only with age. It didn’t matter. It was still far, far too undeniably familiar.

“Stanford?”

Ford drew in a deep, shuddering breath, trying to find her balance. “Fiddleford, my god, what - what did I do to -”

She was interrupted by a thunder of footsteps from the stairs as both Mabel and Dipper came racing down. “Great-aunt Ford, it’s okay!” Dipper shouted, as he skidded to a breathless halt beside Ford. “It’s okay, we've faced the Gobblewonker before, it's just one of Mr. McGucket's robots, and if it was Bill he couldn’t’ve got past the barrier anyway, right?” 

Fiddleford looked up to meet Ford’s eyes, and she forced herself to meet his gaze, not to turn away. “ ‘Great-aunt’?”

“It _has_  been thirty years,” Ford managed. “We have...a lot to catch up on.”

“You c’n say that again,” Fiddleford said, reflectively, before stepping past Ford into the house to talk to Dipper and Mabel, leaving Ford feeling simultaneously frozen into a statue and as though her legs might buckle under her. “Glad t’see you two safe ‘n’ sound! Is that great-uncle of yours around? It ain’t safe out here, you oughtta skee-daddle on down to the bunker.”

“Mr. McGucket!” Mabel chirped, eyes widening, reaching out to clasp one of Fiddleford’s hands in her own. “You came back out here just to look for us?”

Fiddleford’s eyes darted around the room like a cornered animal’s for a few seconds, but he didn’t pull away from Mabel’s death grip, and eventually his eyes came to rest on her face with a shy smile. “Well, I figgered I been a-runnin' and a-hidin' enough fer two lifetimes already. I got a boy out here what needs his father ta protect 'im. And it didn’t feel right ta leave you-’ns out here with the ghoulies after what-all you did for me.”

Mabel held his gaze for a moment, looking almost as though she were on the edge of tears, and then flung both her arms around Fiddleford’s neck in a crushing hug. Dipper hesitated, but he was smiling like his heart was fit to burst, and after a moment joined in on the hug anyway. Ford considered stepping back, giving them some space, but it felt like any movement, any sound, no matter how small, would only draw their attention back to her, ruin the moment. Then again, though, Fiddleford might have more information about the state of the town than they could gather on their own. And Stanley's life could be on the line...

"Um, like, weird old hillbilly guy?" a voice said from the open doorway behind Ford, and Ford was spinning, raising the molecular disruptor and cursing herself for letting herself get so distracted by sentiment, before she could process why its sarcastic tone sounded so familiar.

For the second time in only a handful of minutes, Ford found herself aiming a deadly, high-powered extradimensional weapon, not at the monster she'd been expecting, but at an unsuspecting human. Pacifica Northwest regarded the business end of Ford's molecular disruptor with an expression somewhere between shock and exhaustion, the two girls behind her reaching for weapons of their own amongst what looked like a small makeshift arsenal. It took Ford a moment to recognise Mabel's friends Candy and Grenda under the face paint.

"Ok _ayyyy_ ," Pacifica said, gently pushing the nose of Ford's blaster aside and looking around her at Fiddleford. "Are we, like, just parking this giant robot right out here in plain view of anybody? Like, not like I _care_ , but -"

"We would prefer to not be eaten," Candy finished for her, and Grenda nodded  enthusiastic agreement.

Mabel's gasp of delight was a welcome sound. "Candy! Grenda!" She hesitated a little before calling, "Pacifica!", but her voice was no less enthusiastic when she did. She let go of Fiddleford with one arm and waved her friends over; they ran over to join the hug, nearly crushing Mabel in a cocoon of affection. "I was worried about you guys!"

"We were worried about you!" Grenda's voice boomed, out of the middle of the group hug. "Mr. McGucket and his robot saved us from one of those madness bubbles, but we didn't know what had happened to you guys! Candy and Mr. McGucket were planning a Dipper-and-Mabel-rescue-bot nearly the whole way here!"

Pacifica cleared her throat. "Yeah, I'm...glad you're safe. Also."

Ford glanced down at the sound. She hadn't realised Pacifica was hanging back as well, watching the hugging group with an unreadable expression. When she noticed Ford's attention was turned towards her, Pacifica shot her a defiant glare, as though daring Ford to say anything.

"Aw, Pacifica," Mabel said, and then, apparently coming to some decision. "Get over here!"

Pacifica coughed delicately into one hand. "Um, I think I'm all right back here, thanks. I'm not supposed to touch wild animals or hillbillies. My mother says rabies is bad for the complexion."

"Pfff, _Pacifica_ ," Mabel snorted, but she didn't push it. "Grauntie Ford? Come on, this is a limited-time-only hug-pportunity!"

"Actually, we should probably be getting back to the bunker," Pacifica said, with a nervous glance back over her shoulder towards the door, and it was only then that Ford realised how tightly Pacifica was hugging herself, how much she'd been scanning her surroundings. Pacifica had almost certainly seen something, something that gave her at least an inkling of the true extent of Bill's powers and the true depths of his depravity, and Ford's heart went out to the girl all at once. No wonder Fiddleford was trying to help her. "It's really not safe out here. I don't know where you all have been or what you know about what's going on, but -"

"It's a post-apocalyptic nightmare world out there!" Grenda interrupted, and Candy nodded agreement.

"The world resembles the cover of a death metal album," she said, and then froze. "Which...I do not listen to, as I am busy practising violin. Yeeeessss." Her eyes darted from side to side.

"Haha, well, don't worry, girls," Mabel said, clapping each of them on the shoulder. "You're in the safest place in Gravity Falls! Remember that unicorn hair we definitely obtained through legal, moral and ethical means?"

Grenda raised a hand. "Hey, didn't we -"

Mabel took a step back out of the slowly-disintegrating hug, waving her arms broadly to encompass the entire Shack. "It all went into a cool magic barrier around this place! Nothing can get us while we're in here!"

The slow sinking in the pit of Ford's stomach became a sudden, precipitous drop.

In an attempt to clear her head and quash the feeling, Ford said, "Girls...Fiddleford... You've been out there, you've seen the kinds of horrors Bill has visited on this dimension - tell me, what are we up against?"

Mabel's friends and Fiddleford shared a look.

"It's bad, Dr. Pines," Grenda boomed, finally. "Like...real bad."

"I'm aware," Ford said shortly. "I'm more interested in specifics. Specifically, what kind of obstacles one might expect to encounter between here and the black pyramid."

"Stanford..." Fiddleford's gaze was reproachful, and Ford steeled herself for the recriminations she felt certain were soon to follow, already mentally preparing a stockpile of arguments against the seeming certainty that Fiddleford would try to talk her out of it. "Yer plannin' exactically what I think yer plannin', ain'tcha?"

"Bill has to be stopped," Ford said, the words spilling out of her in a rush. "The future of this dimension - and Stanley's life - depends upon it. And I am the only one who knows how, the only one -"

Thankfully, it was there that Candy interrupted her. "Mr. Pines' life?"

"Grunkle Stan is missing," Dipper spoke up, also pulling away as the group hug slowly disintegrated. "And - Bill, or somebody working for him, left us a message."

"It seems a certainty that Bill has taken Stanley - for what nefarious purpose, we do not yet know." Ford took a deep breath, focusing her gaze on the stair banister rather than meeting Fiddleford's eyes. "It may be that he is simply trying to draw us out."

"Draw _you_ out, ya mean," Fiddleford said, the words pointed and piercing, their tone disappointed. Ford shifted uncomfortably, curling six fingers in the sleeve covering the opposite arm and trying not to meet his eyes.

"Bill also has...reason to hold a grudge against Stanley. There could be any number of explanations as to why he's taken this course of action. Regardless, we can't in good conscience leave Stanley in Bill's clutches. Not to mention that we have no idea what part Stanley may yet play in Bill's plans for world conquest." She cleared her throat, turning her attention back to Candy and Grenda. "Which is why any information you might have that would help us gain access to Bill's lair would be greatly valuable."

"Of course!" Grenda thundered, her usual booming bass increasing in volume until it nearly rattled the windows. "No way we're letting that stupid triangle get Mr. Pines!"

"It would not be Gravity Falls without him," Candy agreed, more quietly but no less vehemently, reaching up to adjust her glasses and accidentally setting off a laser blast from something attached to her wrist. She looked up at the smoking hole scorched in the ceiling, and pursed her lips. "Hm. That firing mechanism may need recalibration."

"Wait, back up." Pacifica's voice, as ever, was like a razor cutting through the conversation. "Did you just say you know how to _stop_ this...Bill guy?"

"Of course she does," Dipper said, glancing up at Ford with pride welling in his eyes. It was almost as bad as the disappointed lack of surprise in Fiddleford's. "Remember the Journal I used to help catch your ghost? Great-aunt Ford _wrote_ that."

Pacifica quirked an eyebrow. "Okay, so you know about busting ghosts. What's - Bill - supposed to be, like, a category ten thousand?"

"A demon," Ford said, and Pacifica's other eyebrow shot up to join its twin.

"Oh, great," she snapped, her voice sharp but brittle. "Just awesome. A demon. And we're going to go up there with five kids, a couple of geezers, and a pig, and - what? Karaoke it to death? Stab it with a knitting needle? Just ask it nicely to please stop destroying everything?"

"Hold hands, actually," Ford corrected her.

Pacifica stared. "You're kidding me."

"No, I'm quite serious. Once assembled, the components of the prophecy wheel can -"

"This is ridiculous," Pacifica snarled, swiping a hand viciously along under one eye and shaking her head. "Pines, please tell me you at least have a jacuzzi somewhere in this scrap heap of a building. I need a good long soak." 

"We...have a tub!" Mabel chirped. 

"I don't know about water, though," Dipper interrupted. "When I tried to turn the tap on to wash my hands, blood came out." He thought for a moment. "At least I think it was blood. Looked like blood, smelled like blood, tasted like blood..."

"Ew, you tasted it?!"

"Damn, the well must be outside the barrier," Ford muttered in realisation.

Pacifica tossed her hair, shutting her eyes. "I guess aromatherapy beads are out of the question, then." She gave a long-suffering sigh, and turned to Mabel. "Lead the way."

...

With Pacifica and Mabel upstairs trying to negotiate a hot bath, and Dipper, Candy, Grenda, and Fiddleford forming a war council of sorts in the living room to discuss how best to get into the pyramid and whether it would be better to bring as many people as possible into the Shack's protections first, Ford decided that she could be spared, for a little while at least.

She wasn't hiding. She was...making a strategic retreat to the basement to see if any parts of the portal or her thought-encryption device could be scavenged to rebuild her quantum destabiliser. There would be very little point in rescuing Stanley only to leave Bill loose in their dimension, and Pacifica's lack of faith in the prophecy wheel did somewhat highlight the possible flaws in relying on it. It would be better to have a backup plan, if at all possible -

"Stanford?"

Ford froze at the sound of the heavily-accented voice in the doorway behind her, slowly turning to face Fiddleford. He looked - dwarfed, somehow, by even the small entrance to her underground study, hunched forwards and looking around him with obvious apprehension, and it took Ford a moment to realise why. It really shouldn't have. The reasons for Fiddleford's discomfort were obvious, staring down as they did from every available surface.

Ford silently cursed herself for keeping all the idols of Bill in the first place, as she hurried to tack up the sheets Dipper had unfortunately pulled down after their ill-fated session with the brainwave encryptor. "Fiddleford - I beg your pardon, I haven't had a chance to clean this place up. I was only looking to cannibalise this machine for parts -"

"We oughtta talk," Fiddleford said, uncurling a little as the various Bills vanished behind the dropcloths, and Ford's words dried up in her throat.

"You must understand," she managed, finally, turning her back and reaching to pin a particularly unwieldy corner into place. "Bill's being here is entirely my responsibility, so naturally I should be the one to -"

"I'm rememberin' lots o' things these days," Fiddleford said, soft, and Ford wrestled with the pin, trying not to listen to the quiet pad of Fiddleford's bare feet against the floor. "You never told me about this."

"What - Bill?" Ford drew in a deep breath, long and sustained.

"Well, that too." Fiddleford's footsteps drew to a halt directly behind Ford. Ford jabbed the pin with more vehemence than it really deserved, and it slipped, stabbing deep into her thumb instead. She exclaimed, stuffing the injured appendage into her mouth with a mumbled curse. 

Worry tinged Fiddleford's voice as he asked, "Are you all right?"

"Fine, fine, just - slight stab wound -" Ford motioned for Fiddleford to go on with the hand she didn't currently have in her mouth, which meant dropping the sheet she'd been trying to pin. She muttered another curse around her thumb, crouching down to retrieve it.

She didn't expect to come face to face with Fiddleford, who gave her a sad smile as he picked up the cloth and held it in place for her to pin.

"I was yer closest friend - heck, yer only real friend - for years an' years, and I never noticed," he said, just when Ford was starting to think he was finished speaking. "Never said a word, no matter what I thought. What kinda friend does that make me?"

"A better one than me, certainly," Ford said, under her breath, forcing herself to really look at her old friend. This close, she could see the scabs dotting his bare scalp, from animal or insect bites or from pulling out his own hair, she couldn't tell, the slow, unthinking meander of his gaze, as though his once-legendary precision focus had simply worn away, the dirt ground into his threadbare overall and the cast that covered his left arm, the leathery, hard-worn texture of his skin...

"I done this-all to myself, so don'tcha start," Fiddleford said shortly, taking a half-step forward. Ford almost wanted to pull back, but she found herself once more rooted, unable to move, even to look away. The slouched, dirty, prematurely ancient man before her bore nearly no resemblance to the intelligent, cheerful, vibrant young man she'd once been proud to call a friend, but she could see - especially after the vision in Mabel's mindscape - that same brilliant spark of personality, even under the years of hardship that had all but smothered the man she'd known.

"If it hadn't been for me, you wouldn't have done anything to yourself," Ford said hollowly, looking past Fiddleford's left ear to avoid meeting his eyes. The voice at the back of her mind, the unpleasantly familiar one she did her best to ignore, went on. _If you'd been smarter. If you hadn't been so self-absorbed. If you hadn't thought your own feelings were so important. If you hadn't fallen for Bill's lies._ "You have every right to blame me."

"Fer what?" Fiddleford snorted. "You never held that mem'ry gun t'my head and pulled th' trigger." He brought an arm up to scratch at the back of his neck. "True, I mightn'ta inventorated it in th' first place outside o' gettin' my head stuck through that there portal, but...I coulda stopped at that. Shoulda stopped at that. This warn't yer fault, Ford." He paused. "You - you _are_ still goin' by Ford? I ain't been callin' you by an old name you hate or nothin'?"

"Yes, yes, I've dropped the 'Stan', but otherwise - Fiddleford, you can't honestly think - if I hadn't been so stubborn, if I'd listened to you from the start -"

"There ya go again, not listening to me," Fiddleford said, and even though his tone was light and his smile teasing, Ford still felt something inside her crumple.

"I'm - I'm so sorry," she managed, and Fiddleford's face creased in a frown.

" _Ford_." Fiddleford took a deep breath, and looked down at his bare toes, scratching the back of his neck. "Truth is...I don't rightly recollect a lot o' the time we worked together, but I know ya hurt me, an' hurt me bad." His accent seemed to thicken as he talked, the more emotional he became, and Ford found her mouth dry, her throat sticking closed when she tried to swallow. "But I didn't do myself any favours, neither. We still got lots to talk about, but - but I've had just about enough a-hurtin' an' a-losin' people. So just stop kickin' yerself an' stop beggin' me ta do it for ya. I'm just glad ta see ya safe an' whole."

Ford wasn't sure if Fiddleford held out his arms first, or if she stepped forward, but somehow she found herself embraced by a pair of skinny, wiry arms, Fiddleford's slight frame pressed against her like a memory made flesh. Ford threw her own arms around him, torn between the impulse to squeeze as tightly as she could to be certain that this was real, he was really here, and the impulse to hold back for fear of snapping her old friend in half.

"Not anywhere near as glad as I am to see you again," she muttered, and was rewarded by a laugh from Fiddleford.

"Ahh, Ford, you always did have ta one-up everybody else." He gave her two solid thumps on her back with his good right hand, and another squeeze around the waist before pulling back. "So! What's a-brewin' in that big ol' brain o' yours? How're we plannin' on takin' Bill out?"

" 'We' -" Ford stumbled over her own words. "Fiddleford, you've done enough. You've done far more than enough, just helping the children, and after what you've been through - I wouldn't put you through more. Not for my sake. Not for the world's."

Fiddleford's gaze bored into Ford like twin lasers. "How 'bout fer Tate's?"

"I - I didn't mean -"

Fiddleford's gaze softened, and he cracked a gap-toothed grin at Ford. "Like I said to the young 'uns - enough a-runnin' an' a-hidin'. Long past time I did a little fightin' back." He grinned up at Ford, then shuffled his feet a little sheepishly, like a child admitting a crush. "Sides, that brother o' yours been good ta me, these past thirty years, when there weren't nobody else watching. I mighta froze a few winters gone if'n it weren't for Stan Pines. But don't - don't tell 'im I told ya that. Man's got his pride." For an instant, Fiddleford curled in on himself, his gaze turning inwards, and Ford felt a sudden, unswayable certainty that Fiddleford was revisiting an unpleasant memory.

"Wait - you and Stanley know each other? You -"

"Well, I reckon that's just about enough yakkin' for right now," Fiddleford interrupted, speaking just a little too loudly for the confines of the basement. "Ain't we got a triangular menace to kick in the right angle?"

...

Fiddleford and the girls, as it turned out, weren't the only refugees to turn up at the Shack. Despite her best efforts to sit down and lay out a plan, Ford found herself interrupted every few moments by a knock at the door and the arrival of another friend, acquaintance, or vaguely familiar face. It wasn't only the townsfolk who show up looking for sanctuary, either - Dipper greeted a many-headed creature he called a 'Multibear' with an excited shout and a hug, and Ford ended up having to negotiate between Dipper and Mabel and a troupe of gnomes seeking a place to hide after their burrows all filled up with an inexplicable root beer flood. Before long, what seemed like half the population of Gravity Falls, both supernatural and otherwise, was crammed into the living room, crowded around the graph-paper map Ford had laid out and was filling in from their various reports.

"- an' somefing wif tentacles fick as yer waist," one of the gnomes chattered excitedly, jabbing a finger at the area of swampland that had once been occupied by something called "Mighty Mike's Ammo Emporium and Fine Lingerie Boutique", apparently. Ford dutifully noted it on the map.

"This information is invaluable," she said, again, to the ring of faces crowded around the map. "Now we have a much better idea of the least dangerous route to the pyramid -"

"Oh no," Mabel groaned, from the window, and Ford looked up.

"What's -" Dipper started, hurrying over to the window as well, and letting out a groan of his own. "Oh, _no_."

"Excuse me," Ford said to the gathered crowd, dropping her marker and jumping up to join the twins at the window. "What's - oh. Oh."

Out in the scrubby gravel of the parking lot, something that looked like a pair of dentures about the size of a human child, with little stubby arms and legs, and something vaguely humanoid, but long and gangly and covered in green fur, were chasing what was either a small child or a pig in a remarkably well-maintained silver bouffant wig around in circles. The - child? Pig? - could be heard wailing and screaming all the way inside the Shack.

“I guess we should probably let him in,” Mabel said, in a tone of voice Ford would have expected more from someone anticipating their own execution than from Mabel, under any circumstances.

“Says who?” Dipper asked. “Nobody has to know we even knew he was out there.”

Ford looked from one twin to the other, unable to conceal her disbelief. “Who, exactly, is that?”

“ _Gideon_ ,” Mabel complained, slumping against the windowsill with her chin in one hand, scowling.

Outside, in the parking lot, the green figure - 8-Ball, one of Bill’s right-hand...men, for lack of a better word, if Ford recognised him correctly - reached out with one overlong arm and pinned the child - Gideon - against the gravel. Gideon’s squeals and cries rose into a register that was almost painful to the ears.

“Mabel, he’s the one who summoned Bill in the first place!” Dipper said, to Mabel’s scowl, which was quickly dissolving into pity. “He started all of this! Honestly, this kind of serves him right.”

“Yeeaaahhhhhh,” Mabel said, long and dragged-out, but she didn’t straighten up from her pathetic slump, and she didn’t sound even slightly convinced.

From outside, Gideon’s pathetic cries turned into words. “Oh, I’m about to be devoured! If only there were _some_ one who could help me!” Ford wasn’t sure, but she thought he’d pressed the back of one hand to his forehead.

“I dunno, Mabel, something about this is fishy,” Dipper pointed out, and Ford nodded.

“You’re right. This doesn’t make sense,” she muttered. “Those are Bill’s minions. There’s no reason for them to waste so much time killing the child, unless they’re toying with him for their own amusement.”

Both Dipper and Mabel looked up at her with identical expressions, somewhere halfway between discomfort and disbelief. 

“We gotta let him in,” Mabel said, finally, decisively. Dipper turned that dumbfounded expression in her direction instead.

"Okay, but you do know this is obviously a trap, right?"

"I knooooooowwwwwww," Mabel whined, slumping over to bonk her forehead against the window. "But what if it's not? What if we just leave him out there and they  _eat_  him?”

“Then we never have to see one of his obnoxious commercials ever again,” Dipper said, with a shrug. “Seriously, Mabel, there is no downside here.”

“You said that this child was the one who summoned Bill back into this dimension?” Ford asked, and Dipper scowled out the window.

“Yeah. He and Bill were all...buddy-buddy.” He said it like the words tasted bad.

“Bill doesn’t have ‘buddies’,” Ford said, watching as the child tripped, the thing like a giant set of dentures - Teeth, if she was remembering correctly - bearing down on him. “He has pawns. And playthings.”

The look of terror on the child’s small, round face was far too real.

Ford was moving before she really realised she meant to, unholstering her blaster as she ran for the door.

Teeth’s mouth - ...torso? - was wide open in clear anticipation when Ford flung the door open and fired. The shot went right down the creature’s throat, a bolt of pale blue light illuminating an oversized uvula and glowing through the top of Teeth’s palate when he snapped his mouth closed.

For a split second, Teeth looked (somehow, despite the fact that he had no face to speak of) surprised that his mouth hadn’t closed on a tasty morsel. His - expression, for lack of a better word - was just starting to turn to rage when he suddenly seemed to blur, to go fuzzy around the edges.

A stiff wind, sweeping through the clearing, dispersed the vaguely Teeth-shaped cloud of disparate molecules where Teeth had been standing moments before.

Ford carefully aimed her molecular disruptor at 8-Ball, who was standing frozen and staring (as best he could with his two wildly-rotating eyes) at the spot where Teeth had been. “Let the child go, or you’re next.”

8-Ball’s eyes turned, on average, towards Ford. Then he turned and started to lope towards the trees surrounding the clearing.

Ford was still breathing hard, trying to calm her racing heart, when the small voice piped up from the ground in front of the porch.

“S-Stanford?”

Ford’s gaze snapped down to the child sprawled in the grass, her heart seizing sharply in her chest. The boy - he couldn’t have been more than ten years old - was staring up at her, eyes wide and - confused. 

Of course. Stanley had taken her name.

Ford breathed out a long sigh, extending a hand in the boy’s direction even as she scanned the trees for more hostiles. “It’s not safe out here. Inside, now.”

“Wait, you’re not -” the boy started, confirming Ford’s suspicion that this was a case of mistaken identity.

“The man you knew as Stanford Pines is my twin brother, Stanley. You can call me Ford,” she said, as the boy scrambled to his feet, dusting off his impressive white pompadour hairdo. “This building is protected by a Bill-proof barrier. Behind these doors, none of his weirdness can touch us.” 

She realised, slowly, that the boy hadn’t heard a word she’d said. Instead, his eyes were fixed on her outstretched hand. 

“Well, wrap me in pastry and call me a pig in a blanket,” Gideon said, hushed, almost reverent. Ford took a step back, curling her fingers into a fist and tucking it behind her back, but the boy’s awestruck gaze turned, instead, to her face. “You’re the Author.”

...

Gideon trailed after Ford all the way into the living room with enormous, starry eyes. He also wouldn't stop peppering her with questions, which grew tiresome far more quickly than she'd imagined. She found herself with a new appreciation for how genuinely respectful Dipper had been of her personal boundaries when she'd first...'arrived' was wrong, considering that she was returning to a long-lost home, but it felt the least wrong out of the options her vocabulary supplied.

"Where've you been all this time, anyway? What made ya abandon all your work? Why'd ya hide your journals? Were you challengin' any who would dare to learn the secrets of ultimate power an' follow in your footsteps to prove that they were worthy?" Gideon sounded purely self-satisfied as he went on, "That was it, wasn't it."

Ford had to stop, mid-step, to stare incredulously down at the small boy. "Does this look like ultimate power to you?"

"I -" Gideon's voice faltered, as he hastily backtracked. "Well, now, I just thought, given as how your journal said -"

"My journals were hidden so that they wouldn't fall into the hands of any who would be tempted by Bill's false promises and attempt to recreate my work," Ford said, aghast. Dipper and Mabel had, of course, mentioned that the child had summoned Cipher, but - Ford had thought that Gideon might at least have had enough common sense to realise, when the entire world started to shatter, that Bill Cipher worked for his own gain and his own gain only - ! "They were never meant to see the light of day again. How did one find its way into your possession?"

"It came to me!" Gideon exclaimed, and Ford actually took a step back, surprised and a little alarmed by his vehemence. Gideon appeared to realise his mistake, because his next words were more subdued, his voice honeyed and an enormous, insincere smile spreading across his round face. “Of course, if I’da known that all of this trouble would come from that one little book, why, I never woulda cracked its cover in the first place!” He gave his head one solemn shake, his expression turning downwards in practiced sorrow.

“Of course,” Ford echoed, warily. “If you’ll excuse me...”

She hurried away before Gideon could follow, ducking into the gift shop and back behind the vending machine. 

...

Gideon didn’t give up. When Ford finally re-emerged from the basement, no longer able to pretend even to herself that she might be able to rebuild the quantum destabiliser which she had spent two decades gathering materials for from across the multiverse out of scrap from her lab, he was waiting, sulking in a corner of the living room watching Pituitaur and Pacifica arguing over hair gel. He jumped when Ford appeared in the doorway, patting his hair nervously.

“Oh, there y’are!” he twinkled, his entire demeanour shifting as he visibly turned on the charm. Somehow, even despite the smudges of dirt on his pudgy cheeks and the snags and tears in his powder-blue suit, Gideon managed to give the impression of gloss, like a photograph, or perhaps a candle left to stand too long in the hot sun. Combined with his wide, too-white smile and thick, down-homey accent, the whole effect was strangely off-putting, though Ford couldn’t quite put her finger on why.

If Gideon noticed her discomfort, though, he didn’t seem to care, plunging forward as though their conversation had never been interrupted. “I must say, I was quite surprised to find that you were related to Stanf- _Stan_  Pines. I must admit that Stan and I have not seen eye to eye for quite some years now.”

“How old are you?” Ford asked, incredulous, but Gideon barreled on as though he hadn’t heard her. 

“As a matter of fact, we’ve even had a li’l ol’ good-natured blood feud goin’ for a while now!” He chuckled, and Ford glanced back over her shoulder, wondering if Gideon was absorbed enough in his monologue that he wouldn’t notice if she left again. “But I daresay it was all a big ol’ misunderstanding, if you and he are twins. Why, I even thought he was jealously guardin’ those journals of yours out of plain ol’ selfishness!”

“Stan - what?”

Apparently misinterpreting Ford’s expression, Gideon nodded solemnly, his bouffant bobbing. “Whatever the secret of ultimate power was, that man guarded it like it was his last expired coupon for canned meat. Same with this house and the first journal! Why, at the time I thought he was just a selfish old codger who didn’t know what he’d got - but now I know he must’ve been hangin’ onto that secret like his livelihood depended on it.” His smile was sly and sidelong, but he batted his big eyes in a parody of innocence. “And who’m I to say it didn’t? _Some_ thing sure kept the tourists floodin’ into this old shack, and if it was Stan Pines’ showmanship, why, I’ll set myself straight on down in a patch of poison ivy.”

Ford had to give herself a short shake. "Are you implying that Stan used my journals for his own personal gain?" It sounded like something she'd expect Stanley to do, and yet...despite what he'd done to her house and her good name, despite his rash, idiotic, _selfish_ decision to reopen the portal, Ford couldn't quite reconcile it with the brother she knew. After all, Stan hadn’t stood to gain anything from reopening the portal except, perhaps, and the chance would have been slim to nonexistent, seeing his twin again.

For the first time since she’d arrived, the look Stan had given her when she’d stepped out of the portal flashed back before Ford’s eyes. For just a moment, Stan had looked like he had everything he could ever have wanted in the world.

For just a moment, before Ford’s fist had met his face, Stan had been perfectly, completely...happy.

“Well, and why not?” Gideon batted his lids in Ford’s direction, the picture of guileless sincerity. “Without your second journal, I woulda had to do a lot more work to keep these fine townsfolk and tourists interested in my li’l ol’ Tent of Telepathy! Why, I simply couldn’t compete with the Mystery Shack without it. I just can’t imagine how else Stanf- _Stan_  might’ve managed it.”

Ford snapped abruptly out of her guilty reverie. “You used my research for _parlour tricks_?”

The wide, smug smile slid slowly off of Gideon’s face, replaced by a confusion which quickly turned to defensive anger. “Wh- I’m tellin’ ya, your own twin sibling did it first!”

“No, you’re _telling_ me that you speculate that Stanley must have made frivolous use of the very serious information contained within my journals, because that’s what _you_  did, and you assume that he would never have achieved as much as he has without resorting to cheating and riding on _my_  coattails,” Ford growled. 

Gideon took a step back, and Ford realised she’d shifted her weight forward, changed her stance, preparing for a fight. 

“Which - I admit, he has, in the past, done,” she said, straightening up and squaring her shoulders so that she no longer loomed menacingly over the child, and clasping both hands behind her back. “But you severely underestimate Stanley if you believe that the only way he could possibly have been successful is through someone else’s effort.” 

“We - are talkin’ about the same Stan Pines here?” Gideon said, narrowing his eyes in a way that made him look astonishingly like Mabel’s pig. “The same Stan Pines I once saw gettin’ that handyman o’ his to pick his nose for him because he was too lazy to raise his arms?”

“I - wait, what?” Ford shut her eyes, huffing out a breath. “No, no, that’s definitely the same Stanley Pines.” She couldn’t quite disguise the shudder of disgust. “Regardless. The information contained within my journals is dangerous beyond - beyond anything you could possibly imagine, and it should never have been used for personal gain.”

“ _You_  were the one who stuck it in a hole in the ground and left it there for anyone to find!” Gideon protested, and Ford had to wonder, again, how any of her journals had made their way into his small, unusually sweaty hands. Most likely through Bill Cipher’s machinations. “And you know, I’m startin’ to think you don’t even know the value of what you’ve got! Do you have any idea what kind of power you could wield even without leanin’ on Bill Cipher?”

For a few moments, Ford found herself speechless. The child seemed to have no idea of the true gravity of the situation, and an unending thirst for the kind of power Bill promised easily and falsely. He would have been, in Bill’s eyes - eye, a perfect pawn.

“Would you come with me a moment?” she said, turning back towards the gift shop. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”

...

“Do you know what started the apocalypse outside?” Ford asked, as the elevator came to a shuddering halt at the bottom floor of the basement. They were now two full storeys underground, and Gideon’s eyes were as big as dinner plates. He hadn’t spoken a word since the elevator doors had closed behind them, too apparently awed by the sights around him, but the grin he wore stretched from ear to ear. 

It all but vanished at Ford’s question, though. Gideon sounded exasperated, like a child being asked a question he knows is rhetorical but who can’t quite see what conclusion he’s being led towards. “Yes, yes, Bill Cipher brought about the end of the world. What _is_  this place?”

“What I wanted to show you,” Ford said, as she stepped out of the elevator, Gideon following on her heels. 

She’d made some progress on dismantling the portal, but since she’d devoted so much time to containing the rift (and to spending time with the children, a little voice in the back of her mind pointed out), there was still more than enough left to stand, grim and imposing, dominating the massive, echoing emptiness of the space beyond the control room. Gideon’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head as Ford led him out of the control room, into the open cavern of the basement proper, into the shadow of the ruined portal.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked, looking up at the crumpled metal that loomed precariously over their heads. 

“This is the secret!” Gideon whispered, his voice excited but sounding curiously strained, as though it was only quiet because he was forcing it through a narrow aperture. “This is what Stan didn’t want me gettin’ my hands on!” He spun, staring up at Ford with a disconcerting intensity. “What’s it do?”

Ford didn’t look away from the looming portal, though she could feel Gideon’s eyes boring into her like lasers. 

“It breaks down the barriers between dimensions,” she said, finally. “Or, perhaps I should say, _broke_  down the barriers between dimensions. Before Bill Cipher used it to drive my best friend out of his mind, strand me in the infinite multiverse, and tear open the fabric of this reality to unleash his weirdness onto it, which if left unchecked will eventually destroy it utterly and wipe it from existence, as it has every other dimension he’s done this to.”

She still didn’t look down, but judged from the series of squeaks and aborted half-words that Gideon was flapping his mouth like a fish. 

“Bill told me so many things, to get me to do what he wanted and build the portal,” Ford said, reaching out to brush a hand against the cool metal, the pads of her fingers gliding easily over its smooth, almost oily surface. “Promised me so many things. Recognition, prestige, knowledge.” She hesitated, just for a moment, before pulling her hand away to clasp in the other behind her back. “Friendship. And in the end, he delivered all of them - and then laughed in my face as he took them all away.” 

Gideon’s voice faltered. “You - your journal said Bill Cipher was a true friend an’ offered ya the key to unlimited knowledge an’ power!” His tone was dark, furious, as he went on, “You listen to me, Stanford Pines, I’ve been underestimated by reason of my size and my age before, kept from what’s mine by rights by people who thought I was too naive and innocent to handle it. D’you know where those people are now?”

“You wanted to know where I’ve been, these last thirty years,” Ford interrupted, speaking up a little over Gideon’s burgeoning tirade. “Well, I’ve been trapped on the other side of a portal of my own creation, cut off from the world I know, set adrift in an infinite number of worlds. I’ve watched my best friend turn from a brilliant, promising engineer into a gibbering wreck, more animal than man, from abuse of his own memory-erasing invention, trying to forget the things he saw on the other side of this blasted portal. I’ve been betrayed and humiliated by someone I _thought_  was my friend, someone I _trusted_ , someone who made me enormous, grandiose promises that he never intended to keep. All because I was foolish enough, wanted what he was promising badly enough, to trust _Bill_.”

She stopped, finally turning to look Gideon in the eye. His expression was unreadable, caught halfway between guilt and defiance, and Ford had to take a deep breath and let it out slow before she could go on.

“Bill Cipher took everything from me,” she said, low. “I am far from the first person he’s ever done this to. And unless I can stop him, here, now, I won’t be the last.”

Gideon didn’t say anything. His face had turned a curious shade of red, and he seemed to be struggling to put words together.

Ford turned back to the portal one last time, gazing up at the ruined monument to her folly. Its hollow centre stared back, like a single dead eye in the centre of its triangular body, and Ford couldn’t suppress a small shiver.

“Come on,” she said, turning on one heel to put her back to the portal and starting to walk towards the elevator, feeling the empty gaze of the portal cold on her back. “There’s a lot of work to be done, and I’m not leaving you alone down here.”

She glanced back over her shoulder once, to make sure that Gideon was following. He seemed somehow subdued, some of his smugness worn away. Ford couldn’t say that she was sorry.

“And don’t call me Stanford,” she said, shortly, stepping into the elevator.

...

Gideon didn’t hang around Ford once they made it back to the main floor, hurrying off towards the stairs with some mumbled, half-formed excuse. Ford was more than willing to let him go.

“Ugh. I hope that little creep wasn’t bothering you,” Dipper said, looking up at Ford as she stopped at the edge of the graph-paper map they’d made of Bill’s new world. It was filled almost to the edges, now, with bright crayon and marker sketches of various monsters and threats, large, looping handwriting and small, cramped lettering spelling out the dangers of various patches of terrain. Someone - probably Mabel - had drawn little smiley faces on all of the monsters.

“No,” Ford said, after some consideration, lowering herself to sit beside where Dipper was lying, flat on his stomach, studying the map around the triangular prism that was standing in for the Fearamid. More of the map was blank, here, but Ford knew better than to assume that meant it was less dangerous. “I think we had a good talk.”

“Okay. Well, if he starts getting weird, just let me know. Me and Mabel have experience dealing with Gideon, we’ll take care of him.” Dipper looked up from the line he was penciling onto the map, taking in Ford’s expression with a worried look. “Hey, are you okay? Look, don’t listen to anything he said. Gideon’s a little weasel, he’ll say whatever he thinks will get to you if he thinks you’ve got something he wants.”

Ford managed a smile. “I think I’ve got quite enough experience in dealing with that kind of individual. No, I’m more concerned about him than about anything he said. He seemed quite thoroughly convinced that Bill Cipher would be a powerful and desirable ally.” She couldn’t stop herself from grimacing.

Dipper shot a dark look in the direction of the stairs. “That’s what I’m worried about.”

It worried Ford, too, a nameless nagging unease that settled in the back of her mind, but she tried to push it down. Her little foray into teaching object lessons had cost her enough time already. There were more important matters at hand.

As if to illustrate the point, Mabel came charging down the stairs, a brightly-coloured bundle gathered in both her arms. She skidded to a halt just inside the living room door, breathing hard, Candy and Grenda coming up behind her.

“Grauntie Ford!” Mabel complained, pushing her way past a unicorn who gave an indignant sniff and a little shudder. Ford didn’t miss the way the unicorn watched warily as the girls passed by, or the stink-eye it got from Candy and the not-at-all-subtle way Grenda flexed her biceps. “Do we have enough information yet? Can we _please_  do something? It looks like it’s just getting worse out there the longer we wait, and - what if - what if we wait too long and Grunkle Stan -”

She stopped, biting her lower lip and looking down at the floor. 

Ford felt as though she’d swallowed a chunk of iceberg.

“You’re right,” she said, looking from Mabel to Dipper and back again. “We’ve gathered more than enough information here, now we need to put it to use.”

“Okay.” Mabel plopped herself down to sit beside Dipper, setting her bundle down beside her. “Please tell me you two nerds have come up with a plan.”

Dipper tapped his pencil against the map, staring at the line he’d drawn. “I was trying to chart the safest route between Bill’s monsters, but -” He sighed, turning his pencil over to furiously erase the ending of the line. “I don’t think there is one. Bill’s really gone to town out there.”

Ford frowned down at the route Dipper had charted. He was right, it was far less than ideal, and if they encountered even half of the obstacles on the way, they would be worn out and practically defeated before they even reached the Fearamid. But, given the state of the rest of the map, she couldn’t say she could see any better options. And that was even without accounting for Bill’s ‘friends’, who no doubt were roaming the carnage outside right now, just waiting to hunt them down...

“I wonder if Fiddleford would be willing to volunteer his monsterbot for transport,” Ford mused aloud, remembering how the thing had roared up the drive. “Perhaps it would camouflage us from the lesser creatures of the Nightmare Realm enough that we might only have to fight Bill’s henchmaniacs -”

“Yeah, but then when we _do_  have to fight, we won’t see it coming,” Dipper said, tapping the eraser of his pencil against his lower lip. “I’ve been inside that ‘bot, the visibility is...not great. And - I don’t think it’s really built to hold up against superpowered nightmare monsters from another dimension.”

They were both quiet for a moment, staring at the map.

“Okay, well, if you two don’t have any ideas, why don’t we ask everybody else?” Mabel said, rolling up her bundle into her arms again. Ford was tempted to ask what it was, but somehow it really didn’t seem to be the time. “And I bet they all really want to help, too, they just don’t know how yet!”

“That’s an admirable idea, Mabel, but...” Ford shook her head. “We can’t ask that of anyone. They came to us as refugees, and we offered them a safe place to stay. We can’t expect them to go back out there, into the throes of Weirdmageddon, to help fix a mess that we - that _I,_ a complete stranger, made.”

“Noooo,” Mabel admitted, leaning back with a glance down at the bundle in her arms, “but I bet they would!”

Dipper glanced up from the map, meeting Mabel’s eyes, before he looked over at Ford, pushing himself up to a sitting position. “Mabel’s right. All these people had Bill take something away from them, not just you. I think they all understand what this is about.”

“Yeah!” Mabel chimed in. “And even if they wouldn’t do it just because you asked, I bet they’d do it to save Grunkle Stan!”

“Wh-” Ford started, but before she could voice any of her objections (this was ridiculous, Stanley was a con man, he’d surely flim-flammed at least half and probably more like ninety percent of the people in this room, not to mention lied to the entire town about who he was for thirty long years!), Grenda interrupted.

“Yeah! Mr. Pines is a town legend!”

“Stan Pines?” a voice piped up from somewhere behind the snoring manotaur who’d taken over the couch. “I can’t imagine this town without him!”

“If it weren’t for the Mystery Shack, Gravity Falls’ economy would’ve collapsed when the logging crisis hit,” a burly man said, behind Ford, making her spin. He crossed his arms, scowling in a way that Ford took to be more a default facial expression than an actual expression of distaste. 

“I can’t count the number of times he’s turned nosey paranormal researchers off our scent,” the unicorn added, in a high, fluting voice that somehow sounded like cough syrup tasted. “There’s a whole exhibit in the Shack devoted to making unicorn sightings in Gravity Falls look fake. Or there _was_ , until a selfish little girl’s pig ate it down to the wire frame.” The unicorn leveled a vicious glare at Mabel, who stuck out her tongue at it.

“It just isn’t a day at the diner without Stan comin’ in for coffee,” a woman with a silver bouffant agreed, nodding so hard that the drooping lid of her left eye flapped a little. “And he’s such a funny guy!”

“When he found out I never got to play catch with my dad growing up, he made it a habit that every time he came to the grocery store, he’d ask me to toss him a dozen eggs,” a reedy-looking man piped up. “Of course, he acted like he was doing it to show off his dexterity and sleight of hand, but he always has been crotchety like that.” His fond smile dipped into a frown. “Is he in trouble?”

Ford looked at Dipper, then at Mabel.

“Actually, yes, he is,” she admitted, feeling the press of eyes on her. “Stanley went missing earlier today, and - we believe that Bill may have had a hand in his disappearance.”

The reaction around the room was instantaneous. People and creatures Ford would never have expected to have the slightest concern about Stanley or his well-being burst into a buzz of worried and excited chatter, voices rising in horror over the hum.

“Well, _that_ won’t do,” the silver-haired woman with the drooping eyelid said, at last, apparently summing up everyone’s feelings on the matter. “How d’we help?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Ford muttered, turning back to the map. “But whatever it is - in order to bring Stanley safely home, we need to defeat Bill Cipher for good.”

The living room went deathly quiet.

“Well, that’s nice, but...” a small voice said, from somewhere near the back of the room. “Aren’t we safe behind this barrier?”

Mabel frowned. And then - to Ford’s surprise and horror - she grabbed her bundle and clambered up to stand on the back of the armchair, wobbling precariously for a moment before she found her balance.

“Okay, people, listen up!” Mabel shouted, making Ford jump. Ford thought she tried to clap her hands, but the bundle in her arms got in the way. “That stupid three-sided jerkface smashed up your town, turned a bunch of people into stone, and took Grunkle Stan. Are we just gonna take that lying down?”

There was a smattering of murmurs from around the room, but for the most part, everyone seemed as surprised by Mabel’s sudden outburst as Ford had been.

Mabel crossed her arms as best she could around the bundle she was carrying, tapping one foot on the chair’s back. “I said  _are we just gonna take that lying down_?”

This time, the murmurs resolved into a few clear ‘no’s.

“That’s right!” Mabel yelled. “Are we going to sit back and eat brown meat and watch TV while some talking trigonometry takes over our world?” When this was met with a slightly more enthusiastic halfhearted mumble, she plunged forward. “Okay, well, maybe _you_  are, but _I’m_  not! That thing has my grunkle, and I’m not giving up until he’s back and we’re all safe!”

This time, the mumble was actually starting to turn into a cheer.

Dipper shot to his feet, nudging aside a gnome to climb up on the dinosaur skull that served as an end table beside the armchair. “Mabel’s right! Look, I understand that this is scary, and it’s going to be difficult - but if we all work together, we might have a chance! And isn’t it better to try than just to stay hidden here until the brown meat runs out and we start turning on each other?”

“Dipper,” Mabel hissed. “Getting kind of dark, not exactly helping...”

“Right!” Dipper said, puffing out his chest and resting one foot on the stack of magazines balanced on the crown of the skull. He faltered, though, his posture shifting into something a little more relaxed, a little more natural, as he met Ford’s eyes.

“One of the kindest, bravest people I know taught me that even when something looks impossible, you only really lose all chance when you give up,” he said, his soft voice ringing loud in the rapt silence. “Grunkle Stan showed me that.” He cleared his throat, thumping a fist against his chest, clearly trying to get his voice to sound less choked. 

Mabel nodded. “Grunkle Stan wouldn’t give up on the people who matter to him. And that’s the only reason we’re all here right now. Because he didn’t give up on us.” She pumped a fist in the air. “So I’m not gonna give up on him! Who’s with me?”

This time, the cheer was less hesitant, more certain and solid. Mabel beamed. “Right! We’re gonna get our town back! We’re gonna get our families back! We’re gonna kick Bill Cipher’s pointy butt right back to where he came from!” She paused, looking out over the crowd. She definitely had their attention now, Ford realised, looking around. Every face was turned towards Mabel, and there was - something in the air, something a little bit charged, like the slow build of static electricity as a thunderstorm rolled across the sky. The quiet felt heavy, loaded, waiting.

“All right!” Mabel cheered, unfurling the bundle of fabric she’d been holding to reveal a banner with Stan’s smiling face emblazoned across it in fabric puff paint and appliqué, along with the legend STAN SAVIOUR SQUAD. Ford caught herself wondering how long it had taken Mabel to make. “Then let’s go rescue Grunkle Stan!”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am, as ever, guilty of story bloat. My planned last chapter of this fic has had to be split into two. Hey, on the bright side: more fic!
> 
> I forgot to add a warning the first time around, but this chapter contains some prime examples of Gideon being his particular brand of awful towards Mabel. Tread carefully if that’ll affect you. Also, I owe all credit to [seiya234](seiya234.tumblr.com) for the golf cart.

"Look at us. When'd we get so old?"

Ford looked over, meeting her brother's eyes in the mirror. "You look like Dad."

"Eugh, don't say that," Stan said, with an exaggerated shudder. 

There was a moment of silence, peaceful, almost companionable. Ford was just beginning to wonder if this was the time to break it when Stan said, awkwardly, holding his own gaze in the mirror as he reached up to scratch the back of his neck; "So, you're a woman now."

"Actually -" It was probably the best she was going to get, Ford decided, biting back the words that gathered at the back of her throat. "Yes." There was nothing to be ashamed of, she knew, but her borrowed turtleneck still felt suddenly too large and filled with prickly heat.

Stan nodded, still not meeting Ford's eyes. "Gotta say, I wouldn'ta seen that one coming."

"And just what is that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing! Nothing, I just -" Stan raised both hands defensively, still not looking Ford in the eye. "Knew some girls like that, back when I was living rough. Hell, I woulda died outside a bar in New Orleans in '76 if it weren't for a couple queens in evening gloves and tiaras. Just...never woulda pegged  _you_  as the type. I still gotta wrap my head around it. How'd you end up figuring that one out, anyway? I woulda thought after seventeen years living with Dad -"

"You don't need to understand, Stanley." Maybe it was unnecessarily rude, but then, her brother never had been one for subtleties, and Ford just needed him to  _stop_  before he strayed too close to the truth and the bitter memories she'd rather try to forget. "You just need to accept that this is the way things are. The way  _I_  am."  _So that we can all move on to more important things_ , Ford's brain supplied, the memory of the dollop of starry spacetime slowly undulating in a glass containment device in the basement below them rising once again to the forefront of her thoughts.

The last thing Ford expected Stan to do was give a sheepish chuckle. "You know, that's almost exactly what Mabel said?"

"What? When -"

"Night the kids got here. I mean, the parents explained a bit when they asked me to take 'em, but Mabel was the one to sit me down and give me the crash course." Stan huffed out a laugh. “Lotta things changed since the seventies.”

Ford's mind whirled, playing back all the many, many changes to her home dimension that she'd been forced to process immediately upon arrival. "Mabel? But I thought Dipper said he -"

"Yeah, yeah, Dip's the one who's transgender or whatever they're calling it now, but..." Stan fixed Ford with a look that made her feel not unlike the first time she'd stood up in front of the grant committee. "That kid's not usually as outgoing as he was with you, you know."

"Me? Why me? He doesn't know me from a - a hole in the ground."

"That's where you're wrong, poindexter. That kid's been hero-worshipping that damn journal of yours all summer." Stan's stare softened, almost imperceptibly, before it turned into a glare. "You're his hero. And so help me, if you let him down, if you hurt those kids, I'll break your stupid glasses. And your nose with 'em."

“What? You can’t honestly think I would ever-”

Stan crossed his arms over his chest, staring in the general direction of the mirror instead of turning to face Ford. “I’m just sayin’, last time I tried to help you we nearly both got sucked into that portal of yours. Just stay away from those kids. I don’t want them in danger.”

With great effort of will – and, she thought, impressive restraint – Ford managed to bite back the selection of choice words that threatened to slip from her lips. “Fine,” she snapped, instead, turning her back on her brother. “Then you’ll ensure that they  _stay out of my way_.”

It might have been pure spite that made her turn back when she heard the shuffle of Stanley starting to move. “And Stanley? When the summer ends, so does this Mystery Shack nonsense. You give me my house back, you give me my  _life_  back -”

“Thought you didn’t want it anymore,” Stan said, coldly, and there was something wrong with his voice. It was just slightly...off, as though Ford had tried to reconstruct his tone and cadence from –

... _memory..._

“Stanley?” Ford asked, but her brother only went on, as though his voice was playing from a pre-recorded script.

“You’re not Stanford Pines anymore.  _I’m_  Stanford Pines! I’ve been Stanford Pines the last thirty years! And I’ve done a better job of it than you ever did. What’d you accomplish, anyway? Causin’ the end of the world?”

“Stop it,” Ford said shortly, and Stan gave a sort of half-laugh, half-snort that had no humour in it.

“Stop what? Telling the truth? You don’t belong here anymore. There’s no place for you to fill. Stanley Pines is dead, Stanford Pines is right here.  _And he sure as hell never had a sister.”_

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. This wasn’t – wasn’t how this conversation –

For the first time, Ford looked, not at her brother’s reflection in the glass, but at his face.

Yellow eyes glowed above a massive, wicked grin that looked much too much like the smile that Stanley wore as Mr. Mystery for comfort. Ford took a step back as the imposter turned to face her, still grinning, shoulders back, posture triumphant. Gloating.

“Bill,” Ford hissed, reaching into her coat for a weapon, only to come up empty-handed.

The imposter in front of her winked one slit-pupiled eye, pointing an index finger at her. “GOT IT IN ONE, KID! GOTTA SAY, YOU SURE DO TAKE A WHILE TO CATCH ON!”

“What are you doing here? This isn’t what -” Ford glanced around, a sudden uncertainty trailing chilly fingers up the back of her neck. “Isn’t how I remember it...”

“ISN’T IT, NOW?” Bill said, his voice dripping with mocking sympathy. “WOW, CAN’T IMAGINE WHY THAT MIGHT BE!”

“You. You did this, somehow you tampered with my memory -”

“OH, SIXER, I’M FLATTERED! BUT YOU’RE GIVING ME TOO MUCH CREDIT.” Bill waved one of Stanley’s hands dismissively, before snapping his fingers. The room around Ford suddenly burst into flame, a ring of yellow fire trapping her in close with Bill and the mirror. “NOPE, THAT PESKY BARRIER OF YOURS IS STILL DOING ITS JOB! FOR _NOW_.”

Ford tried to ignore the way Bill’s voice dropped into a register almost too low for human hearing to detect, the way it rumbled up her legs and thrummed in her lungs. She drew in a deep breath, trying to centre herself, control her fear. “So you’re just doing what you always do. Plaguing me with your ridiculous, pointless nightmares because there’s nothing you can do to touch me.”

Bill shrugged Stan’s shoulders, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling with a mocking grin. Ford glanced up as well, and immediately wished she hadn’t. The twisted, howling faces that emerged from the woodwork would be etched on her imagination for weeks. “HEY, YOU SAY NIGHTMARE, I SAY SNEAK PREVIEW!”

“Sneak...”

Bill’s gaze snapped back onto Ford, like a laser, focused and intent on burning a hole right through her. “REMEMBER HOW I GENEROUSLY WARNED YOU I WAS HAVING SOME FRIENDS OVER?”

Ford shook her head. The memory of the nightmare that had driven her to reveal the rift to Dipper and started this whole blasted chain of events in motion jumped immediately to mind, but she couldn’t quite string it together with what was happening around her now. “You got what you wanted. The rift is open, the world is your plaything, everything we know has changed - what could you possibly be warning me about?”

Bill’s smile, if it were possible, grew even wider, stretching Stan’s face in a way that Ford knew from painful personal experience would leave his jaw aching for days afterwards. She winced in sympathy, and that was when it struck her, like a thunderbolt.

“ _No_ ,” she snapped, pointing an accusatory finger at Bill. “Stanley would never, he’s - he’d see right through you! You have nothing to offer him! He’d never make a deal with you -”

“OH, IS THAT SO?” Bill let out an enormous belly laugh, and the faces on the ceiling howled in an unholy harmony. “IT’S BEEN THIRTY YEARS, SIXER! AND YOU’RE WALKING, TALKING PROOF THAT  _PEOPLE CHANGE_.”

Ford swallowed, hard, past the lump that had appeared, unbidden, in her throat. “You keep your filthy two-dimensional hands off of my brother, or -”

“OR YOU’LL WHAT?” Bill took two steps forward, leering into Ford’s face. She tried to step back, but the ring of flames nipped at her heels, pushing her forward into Bill. “FACE IT, FORDSY, YOU’VE ALREADY LOST! THIS WORLD IS MINE NOW! I CALL THE SHOTS! AND IF I WANT YOUR BROTHER - AND, YANNO, I THINK I _DO_  WANT YOUR BROTHER, HE SEEMS LIKE A FUN GUY! - THEN IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME!”

Both of his slit-pupiled, yellow eyes suddenly turned to little clock faces, hands frantically whirring around the hours as he pressed even closer into Ford’s personal space. 

“TICK TOCK, SIXER!” Bill shouted, brightly, with far too much glee.

Ford –

...

Ford jolted awake.

For a long moment, it felt like an impossible weight was pressing down on her chest, crushing the breath out of her. She clawed at her constricting turtleneck with one hand, pressing the other to her mouth even as she tried to drag in a lungful of air, as though she could physically stuff down the cry that was climbing up her throat.

Darkness had gathered around the Shack so gradually that Ford had barely noticed the red light draining from the sky. Now, it seemed as though night had fallen all at once, a blanket of pure dark dropped over the Shack, muffling the distant shrieks and roars from the town. The living room had, she realised, fallen almost silent, the warm dark full of the sounds of soft snores and sleepy mumbles. Nearly every person Dipper had spent the afternoon enthusiastically introducing her to as ‘the author of the Journals, my great-aunt!’ had either trickled out or found bedding somewhere and hunkered down to sleep. Even Dipper's head was bobbing forward, the bottom of his shirt falling out of his slack mouth, and Mabel was curled up wrapped in the STAN SAVIOUR SQUAD banner, passed out across her pig. 

Ford’s lungs finally inflated, and she gasped in a huge gulp of air. She felt nearly boneless with relief, and yet, the darkness still pressed in on her. She could still see Bill’s clock-face eyes set in Stanley’s familiar face hovering before her, the hands racing. Could still hear his jeering voice promising - no. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. Bill might be clever, and devious, and capable of slipping poisoned-honey words into a willing ear like no one Ford had ever met, but still, surely Stanley would never - 

 _Tick tock_.

Ford forced herself to take one long, deep breath, to let it out slowly, listening to her heart gradually calming from its frantic pace. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. Bill was only trying to get to her again, get inside her head. If he’d really been able to get Stanley to join him, he wouldn’t be wasting time on dreams and visions. He would’ve just dragged Stan’s body back to the Shack to gloat. Stan would never fall for Bill’s lies, Stan was - was better than that, was _smarter_ -

She must not have shouted in her sleep, if she hadn't woken the children. Either that, or they were so exhausted that they'd slept right through it.

Regardless, it was well past time they were in bed. Ford took a few more deep breaths before pushing herself to her feet, wincing at the sudden rush of blood from her head. The living room wobbled and flashed bright black and white at the corners of her vision for a moment before everything settled again.

Dipper shook awake the moment Ford put a hand on his shoulder, head snapping up and looking around like a startled deer. "I wasn't asleep!" he protested, dropping the volume of his voice when Mabel sighed and rolled over in her sleep. "I was...contemplating."

Ford couldn't help the smile that stole across her face. "Do you think you could contemplate better from the comfort of your own bed?"

"No, I can do this, I can -" Dipper stopped when Ford gave his shoulder a gentle squeeze, sighing and looking down at the carpet by his feet. "I blew it, didn't I." It didn't come out as a question.

"What do you mean, my boy?"

"I don't know, I just -" Dipper threw his hands out helplessly. "It feels like there's something more I should be doing, but I just don't know what, or how, and now you're putting me to bed like a little kid."

Ford bit down on her lower lip, unsure of what to say. She knew exactly what Dipper meant - every second they spent not finding a way to get Stanley back felt like a second wasted. There had to be something that would make Dipper feel less like he was failing, but she couldn’t even begin to imagine what that might be.

If she could, perhaps she’d be feeling a little more hopeful herself.

Finally, she let out a sigh, and lowered herself to sit on the floor beside Dipper, groaning at the stiffness in her knees. “Everyone else is already asleep, we won’t accomplish much by staying up and draining ourselves further. We’ll all need to be at our best to face Bill and whatever surprises he might throw at us tomorrow.” She did her best to swallow down the bitter, sick taste that rose in the back of her mouth at the thought of what those surprises might include.

“I know,” Dipper said dejectedly, rubbing his upper arm and staring down at the floor. 

Ford looked down herself, her eyes wandering until they came to rest on the gentle rise and fall of Mabel’s chest under the banner she’d wrapped herself in. 

“Why don’t you come help me get Mabel to bed,” she said, and Dipper seemed to perk up, just a little. “If you’re still not feeling like sleeping afterwards, we can reconvene here and see if we can find any flaw in the plan that we might have overlooked.”

“Okay,” Dipper conceded, and Ford noticed a small smile had stolen across his face as he watched Mabel and Waddles snoring, though there was still a little wrinkle of worry in his brow. Ford didn’t blame him - the last time they’d watched Mabel sleeping this peacefully, they hadn’t known whether she would ever wake up.

 _Bill_. It all came back to him. Every single person in the Shack, from Fiddleford passed out with his blowtorch in hand over the giant robotic leg he was welding right on down to the plaidypus curled up with the cross-eyed gnome in the corner had lost something - if not everything - to Bill. If it weren’t for Bill, Mabel would never have been forced to see a world where everyone seemed happier without her. If it weren’t for Bill, Dipper wouldn’t have been made to doubt himself like this, wouldn’t be shouldering this burden of responsibility that should never have been his in the first place. ( _Not when it had been all Ford’s fault, right from the beginning, her folly and her arrogance and her pride_  -)

If it weren’t for Bill, Stanley would be here with them right now, probably cracking some awful joke and then laughing at his own lack of wit when no one else did. Stanley would be here, aggravating everyone as usual, putting on that showman’s smile to make the children feel better, treating the whole thing like one big joke. Stanley would be _safe_ , and he wouldn’t be - and he would know what to say to make Dipper feel better, and -

None of this would be happening if it weren’t for Bill Cipher.

Ford’s hands clenched into fists without her input, nails digging into the heels of her hands. She tried not to listen to the traitorous little voice in the back of her mind that whispered _none of this would be happening if you hadn’t let him in._

“We’re not going to defeat Bill tomorrow,” Ford said, slow, turning her gaze back to Mabel. 

There was a quaver in Dipper’s voice. “We’re, uh, we’re not?”

“No.” Ford slammed one fist into the palm of her other hand. It felt like a river of lava was rising slow through her veins, the heat pulsing in time with her heartbeat. “We’re going to _destroy_  him.”

...

Mabel woke up briefly as Ford carried her up the stairs, her enormous yawn audible even though her face was pressed against Ford’s shoulder. At twelve years old, the twins were _almost_  too tall to comfortably carry, but Ford hadn’t wanted to wake the girl, not when she seemed to be sleeping peacefully. If Ford herself had been able to steal a fraction of that peace in the middle of Weirdmageddon, she wouldn’t have wanted it disturbed.

“Whzfl?” Mabel asked, sleepily, and Dipper piped up before Ford could say anything.

“It’s okay, Mabel, we’re just going up to bed. You fell asleep on Waddles.”

Mabel let out a sigh, her head falling back against Ford’s shoulder. “How late is it?” she asked, sounding a little more awake, though not much.

“Well, according to Bill, time is dead and meaning has no meaning, but I’d say it’s definitely past your bedtime,” Ford answered, drawing a little snort of laughter out of Mabel.

“That means you too, Dipper,” Mabel said, her voice muffled in Ford’s sweater. “I saw you gnawing your shirt.”

“Aw, Mabel,” Dipper protested, but he didn’t try to deny it.

And he didn’t try to resist when they made it up to the attic and Mabel slipped down out of Ford’s arms and pointed...well, pointedly at the bed across the attic from hers. “Bedtime, mister,” she said, and Dipper shook his head, but he was smiling. 

“And that goes for you too!” Mabel added, rounding on Ford. “We’ve got an awesome giant robot house to pilot and an evil geometrical guy to fight tomorrow! You don’t wanna fall asleep in the middle of it! You’ll miss all the fun parts!”

Ford, despite herself, couldn’t help a soft laugh. “You’re right,” she said, nodding in Mabel’s direction. “I’ll leave you two to it, then. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight!” Mabel echoed, Dipper giving a sheepish wave as Ford stepped out of the attic room and pulled the door closed behind her, careful not to let it slam.

The Shack was eerily still as Ford made her way down the attic stairs. It was strange. She’d lived here, alone, for nearly a decade, and yet, after only a couple of months, it already felt wrong for the place to be so silent.

Ford paused on the second-floor landing, glancing down the hall towards her room before turning towards the stairs down to the main floor. She’d meant what she’d told Dipper. They all needed to be at their best tomorrow. Bill was cunning and vicious - he’d give no quarter, and they wouldn’t get any second chances. Ford knew she ought to try to get some sleep, to make sure that she herself was alert and sharp when their long-delayed confrontation finally came.

That, too, was strange. For years - thirty of them, to be exact - that thought had been Ford’s sole comfort. One day, she would come face-to-face with Bill Cipher for the last time. One day, she would put an end to this game of cat and mouse that they had played for so long, lay all her mistakes to rest, wipe her ledger clean. Even if it meant the end of her as well as Bill.

But now, for the first time, the thought of finally facing Bill filled Ford not with comfort, but with a sick, sinking dread. 

All of her long, hard years of preparation, all of her plans, all of her strategy, it had all come to nothing in a snap of Bill’s fingers. Ford was running blind, while Bill held the upper hand - as, Ford now saw, he always had. The last time she’d prepared herself to face him, she’d been calm, confident. Certain. Now, all she could feel was jittery, buzzing with a nervous energy that bordered on frantic, a need to do something more, something better, _something_.

Ford knew why. Last time, she’d had a plan. Last time, she’d known what she was doing, what needed to be done. Last time, she’d known - she’d _thought_  - she was equal to the task.

And the last time she’d prepared herself to face Bill, hers had been the only life on the line.

The silent dark of the Shack pressed in on Ford as she stared down the stairs towards the living room, like a smothering, heavy blanket. She tried not to see monsters rising out of the well of shadow at the foot of the stairs, not to hear sinister whispers in the soft snores from the living room. The unicorn-hair barrier should keep them safe, here. Unlike Stanley, who might - who _must_  be facing unimaginable horrors even as Ford tucked the children safely into bed and settled down for the night herself.

The worst part was not _knowing_. Not knowing what awful things Bill might be doing to Stanley, yes, not knowing what Bill’s game was, why he might be taunting her with the threat of turning Stan against them, but worse, not knowing what to _do_. Mobilizing the Shack and its protective barrier had been a stroke of genius on Fiddleford's part, an ingenious solution to the problem of how to get to Bill’s pyramid, but what would they do if - _when_  they got there? Ford still hadn’t been able to identify all the members of the prophecy wheel, and the news that Bill’s eyebats had been kidnapping people and turning them to stone meant that she could be missing vital pieces. She didn’t have enough information, didn’t know anything about the people of this town or how to go about learning enough about them to successfully place them on the wheel  - if only Stanley were here, he could have sorted this out in a matter of hours, maybe only minutes, but he _wasn’t_  and anything at all could be happening to him while Ford was busy battering her head against a problem that she had no idea how to even begin to think about solving, but which she still somehow _had_  to solve, or else -

A vision of Stan’s face when Ford had stepped out of the portal, the shocked, disbelieving smile that had spread across it in the seconds before she’d punched him, floated to the surface of Ford’s memory. Her grip on the railing tightened, until she feared she’d give herself splinters.

No. She wouldn’t be sleeping tonight.

...

Ford was digging through the hall closet, looking for blankets or pillows or some kind of bedding (and not for illegal fireworks, or a crate of Cuban cigars that, judging from the labels, had been there since the early eighties at the latest, or a painting of a sad clown on black velvet,  _honestly_ , Stan) when she heard the front door creak open.

It felt like someone had threaded a live wire down her spine. Ford was instantly awake, alert, listening hard for the slightest sound. The cold stillness of the closet suddenly seemed deathly, every shadow heavy with menace.

Heavy footsteps made the elderly boards of the porch complain softly, and Ford could hear lowered voices, murmuring in thrumming bass tones. She couldn't make out the words, but she hardly needed to. Anyone trying to sneak into the Shack undetected, at this hour, after everyone else was already asleep, couldn't be up to anything good.

Ford tried to ignore the jackhammer beat of her heart, keep her breathing quiet, slow, steady. She took a careful step closer to the door of the closet, scanning the hall before her before reaching up to tug the string to shut off the light.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the sudden darkness, a moment that Ford spent watching, tense, for monsters to lunge out of the dark at her, watching afterimages swim in front of her eyes and trying not to mistake them for actual movement. The low mumble of voices from the entryway, thankfully, didn't so much as falter. They must not have noticed the light from the hall, then, to not have been concerned about its disappearance. That was good. That meant Ford still had the element of surprise on her side.

She crept forward, peering out around the closet door. Her night vision was slowly returning, enough so that she could catch a glimpse of movement in the entryway at the end of the hall. Ford sucked in a breath and ducked back behind the door, listening hard for footsteps stomping down the hall towards her hiding place.

Instead of the expected footsteps, though, Ford heard a voice that, despite the fact that she'd only known the speaker for a day, was instantly recognisable.

"And careful with Mabel! I don't want a hair on my marshmalla's head outta place!" Gideon's halfhearted attempt at a whisper turned dismissive as he added, "But if something were to...happen...to that meddlesome twin o' hers, why, well now, wouldn't that just be a shame." His tone made it very clear that he did not, in fact, think this was the case.

Ford bit back the curse she wanted to hurl. Dipper had been right. It had been a trap. And she'd walked right into it, as Bill must have known she'd do, unable to resist playing the hero.

This was no time for self-recriminations, though. The children were in danger. Ford drew her blaster as quickly as she dared, trying not to make a sound, and stepped quietly and deliberately out into the hall.

Every step she took felt like an eternity, every one of her senses screaming as she drew closer and closer to the entryway. The voices fell silent when she was about halfway there, replaced by the creaks and thumps of someone heavy trying to move quietly over the aging floorboards. Ford held her breath, pressing herself against the wall and edging closer to the corner that would let her out into the entry and finally bring her face to face with the intruders.

The thump of heavy footsteps took on a hollow quality, rising up the stairs towards the attic. Ford squeezed the handle of her blaster tight enough to make her knuckles ache, to keep her index finger from tightening on the trigger, and dared to steal a glimpse around the corner. 

The entryway was thronged with - well, Ford hadn’t been in her home dimension for quite some time, but goons were pretty much the same the multiverse over. At least they all appeared to be human, though they also all seemed to be hanging on Gideon’s every word. That couldn’t bode well. It was difficult to tell in the low light just how many there were, but Ford was sure she was badly outnumbered, and, as she’d learned from long experience, charging in now with guns blazing would only take away the one advantage she still had. 

“An’ Fishbait?” Gideon called down the stairs, and Ford had to remind herself to breathe quiet, slow, steady. She hadn’t been spotted yet. She wouldn’t let her emotions get the better of her, give away her element of surprise. But - if that little _cretin_  so much as laid a hand on either Dipper or Mabel - 

Breathe. Quiet. Slow. Steady.

“Yeah, boss?” a nasal voice from the foot of the stairs echoed back, and Ford froze, holding her breath. Whoever was talking was just around the corner she’d just peered around. 

“Don’t you waste too much time on the townies. Just find that unicorn-hair barrier Bill told us about an’ take out a piece, he’ll take care of the rest.”

“Yeah, boss,” the voice agreed, and there was a soft shuffling. The door creaked open, then closed again. Heavy footsteps continued up the stairs, fading as they rose towards the second floor.

Ford drew in another long, steadying breath, clicked her blaster to ‘stun’, and stepped out around the corner.

The two thugs Gideon had left standing in the foyer, one hanging around by the door, one by the staircase, both jumped at Ford’s appearance. The reedier one by the door reached for something at his hip, and Ford lined up, squeezed her eyes shut, and fired a stunning bolt directly into the man’s chest. She opened her eyes just in time to see her target slumped against the wall and the man who had been standing by the stairs staggering backwards, a hand over his eyes, clearly blinded by afterimages from the flash of the stun bolt. Ford fired off another shot in his direction, then hesitated. She wanted nothing more than to charge straight up the stairs after Gideon and his cronies, but - if she let the barrier be broken, then there would be nowhere safe left in Gravity Falls.

Ford muttered a curse that maybe seven other people in this dimension had ever heard uttered aloud, and sprinted for the door.

...

The stairs felt a million miles high. Ford took them two at a time, even though her breath was starting to come hard and her legs burned with every step. Any thought she might have had of stealth or strategy had vanished, reduced to a single, overwhelming focus. All she could think, all she could see, were the terrible possibilities unspooling through her mind. Perhaps she’d stopped the objectively greater threat, for the moment, but she couldn’t tell that to the lump in her throat or the frantic thump of her heart.

She hadn’t made it to the top of the attic stairs before every last one of her fears burst to technicolour life at the sound of Mabel’s shout.

“Let go of me, you - you - you big gorilla!”

“You won’t get away with this, Gideon!” Dipper yelled, from somewhere at the top of the attic stairs. Ford hit the landing at a dead run, crossing it in two steps.

“Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong, Dipper Pines,” Gideon’s smarmy voice echoed down the stairs that Ford was climbing, smug and triumphant. “I already have! Turns out that li’l ol’ barrier y’all were so proud of sure don’t work so well on humanfolk, does it? All I have to do is give the signal, and Bill’s eyebats’ll be all over this ol’ place like flies on a cowpat. And my oh my, but unicorn hair’s such a fragile material. Don’t you agree? Why, anythin’ could just... _happen_...to it.”

“You _monster_!” Mabel gasped, her voice muffled by the attic door.

“Scream all you want, sugarplum,” Gideon giggled. “Nobody’s comin’ to help you -”

“Wrong,” Ford said, flinging the attic door wide. Her head felt curiously light, but at least her aim was steady as she stepped into the room, pointing her blaster directly at the dead centre of Gideon’s head. “Put the children down. _Carefully_ ,” she added, when the pale-eyed goon carrying Dipper under one arm and Mabel under the other looked suspiciously like he was about to drop them both unceremoniously to the floor.

“Well, well,” Gideon said, turning slowly in place to face Ford. “Seems I spoke too soon. Evenin’, Stanford.”

“Just Ford,” Ford snapped. “I said, let Dipper and Mabel _go_.”

Gideon tapped a fat finger against his chin, his smile growing as he pantomimed thought. “Hm, no, I’m thinkin’ not.” He held up both hands and clapped them, twice, and Dipper’s shout came just a moment too late. 

“Great-aunt Ford, look out -”

The blow collided with the back of Ford's head like a thunderclap. She barely had time to wonder which of Gideon’s cronies had snuck up behind her, and how, before the world went dark.

...

A low rumble was the first thing Ford was aware of, a deep bass buzz vibrating up through her bones and rattling her teeth. Slowly, the rumble solidified into engine roar and the rattle of wheels over gravel. The floor jolted and shivered underneath her, nearly knocking the air out of her lungs more than once.

Ford opened her eyes.

The sky overhead was reddening with early dawn light. Ford had seen some truly spectacular skies in her thirty years of wandering, but none quite like this. It looked like some particularly deranged - and tasteless - set designer had slapped it together for a Grand Guignol opera. The whole thing seemed awash in blood, save for the eye-searing pus-yellow shimmer of the rift hovering above the black pyramid. The whole sky glared like a gaping wound.

It was a little difficult to see properly, however, because of the bars and the roof of the cage obscuring her vision.

“A _cage_?” Ford sputtered, pushing herself up off of the bouncing metal floor to grab at the bars, in the faint hope that she might find one loose, or illusory, or discover some other means of escape. She had no such luck. All she got was a clear view of the rough ground bumping away behind her. Apparently the floor was rattling because it was, in fact, the bed of a heavily-modified pickup truck. A _cage_! There were many things Ford could name that would be more humiliating and demeaning, but with solid metal bars between her and the outside world, none sprang to mind.

“Yeah. I tried to tell Gideon it was kind of overkill,” Dipper’s voice said, and Ford let go of the bars to spin around. Her great-nephew was sitting slumped against the bars at the back of the cage, his hat tipped down to cover his eyes. “In case you haven’t noticed, he’s...kind of a drama queen.”

So Gideon had them. Which meant that they were being delivered, gift-wrapped, to Bill Cipher.

Ford gripped the bars behind her for support, suddenly feeling as though all of her strength had bled right out of her in between breaths. For a moment, everything seemed to settle down on her, like layers of sediment, leaving her immobile, fossilised. 

Ford reached down to draw her coat tighter around herself, only to discover that it wasn't there. A frantic search revealed that her weapons had been taken as well, even the small laser knife she kept strapped to her ankle. Certainly, it didn't _actually_ leave her defenceless - she was perfectly capable of killing another being in hand-to-hand combat, if it came to it - but that didn't stop the firework-bursts of panic that slashed between her ribs and splashed against the back of her skull. Her own movements felt strange, disconnected, as though she'd been divorced from her body. As though she'd been forced out of it -

She drew in another breath, as long and deep as she dared with the thick dust and wafts of sulphur and cotton candy on the wind, feeling the roughness of the bars digging into her palms.

When she trusted her voice again, she asked, “Are you all right?”

Dipper shrugged one shoulder. He didn’t look up. 

“Mabel...?” Ford asked, looking around the small enclosure, though she already knew what she’d find.

“She’s up front with _him_ ,” Dipper spat, raising his head for the first time as he jerked a thumb towards the narrow window a little ways above his head. “Gideon didn’t wanna let her out of his sight.”

Ford nodded. It felt like all she could do. She didn’t want to voice what she knew they both must be thinking. 

The weight of their situation, the true depths of her failure, still threatened to fall on Ford, crushing her utterly, but just as she had so many times before, she managed to force it aside. No one else was coming to save them. There was no one to rely on but herself. She couldn’t let Dipper down. She couldn’t afford to break.

“All right,” Ford said, the gears of her mind slowly, ponderously grinding back into motion. “We need to get out of here, find some way to liberate Mabel -” A thought struck her, and she paused, before crossing the bed of the truck in two strides to peer in through its narrow back window. “Gideon mentioned something about Bill wanting us. It would only make sense that that would be where he’s delivering us. If we can take control of this vehicle, perhaps we can use it to enter Bill’s lair undetected.”

“That’s a great idea!” Dipper said, pushing back his hat as he looked up, the ghost of a smile slipping across his face. It vanished as he went on, though, along with the note of hope that had momentarily lit up his voice. “But I don’t know how we’re going to get out of here. I had a look around while you were unconscious, and this thing is locked up pretty tight. I think they welded these bars straight into the frame of the truck.”

Ford gave the back window a cautious push with the pads of her fingers. It felt as thick as it looked, solid, difficult to shatter without being able to get a good wind-up for fear of hitting the bars instead. There was no give in it to suggest that it might be, if not shattered, then popped out of its setting by a well-thrust elbow. And even if she could damage or remove the window somehow, she wouldn't be able to reach far enough across the back seat to get at the driver or Gideon in the front seat. If she only had some kind of weapon - !

“Ugh! Why can’t you just leave us _alone_!” Mabel’s voice rose, and Ford shifted her attention to the glowing purple thing in the backseat. She’d overlooked it before because it didn’t seem like anything that might help them escape, but now that she saw what it was, it took everything in her not to punch the glass despite knowing how little good it was likely to do.

Mabel was caged, too, locked up in an elegant, scrollwork birdcage just barely big enough for her to sit up in, a huge, triangular padlock marked with a shooting star sealing it closed. She was hugging her knees, her sweater stretched out over them. Ford couldn’t see her face, but she was certain it was a picture of misery.

Gideon spun as best he could in his carseat, pressing a hand against the lapel of his powder-blue suit with a look of put-upon patience. “Mabel, dumplin’, I’m doin’ this for us -”

“ _There is no us!”_ Mabel exploded, waving both arms through the bars of the cage so violently that it nearly slid off the backseat. “Gideon, I liked being your friend, but I don’t even want to be that anymore! This is, like, the third time you’ve tried to kill my whole entire family!”

“Fourth,” Dipper muttered, pushing himself to his feet and walking over to where Ford was standing, pulling himself up on tiptoes to peer into the cab of the truck. 

Mabel plunged onwards, clearly unable to hear Dipper’s addition. “What made you think that hurting the people I care about would _ever_  make me like you _more_?”

Gideon looked stunned, like Mabel had hit him across the face rather than just shouted at him. “They - they were comin’ between us -”

“The only thing ‘coming between us’ is you being a big, creepy _jerk_!” Mabel took a deep breath, her voice lowering in volume enough that Ford had to strain to hear her next words over the rumble of the truck’s engine and the rattle of the gravel underneath its wheel. What she lacked in volume, however, Mabel more than made up for in intensity. “And if you turn us over to Bill and stop us from rescuing Grunkle Stan - I will _never_  stop hating you! Ever ever _ever_!”

“Mabel -”

“ _Ever!_ ”

“Wow, go Mabel!” Dipper said, softly, and Ford looked down to see him beaming from ear to ear. 

Gideon, for his part, looked almost at a loss for words. He reached carefully out towards Mabel, only for her to cross her arms over her chest and toss her head, turning away from him. 

“Well...well,” Gideon started, weakly, sounding a little rattled, but growing in confidence with each word. “I’m certain we can do somethin’ about that. Bill _is_  the master of the mind, after all.”

“What, so your response to her saying she doesn’t want anything to do with you because you’re a creepy jerk is to double down on being a creepy jerk?” Dipper spat, in apparent disbelief. “Cause, no offense, but that hasn’t exactly been a winning strategy for you so far.” He let out an enormous sigh, spinning to lean against the back wall of the truck and pressing the heels of both hands against his eyes. “Okay. We gotta do something, we gotta get Mabel out of there before -”

He cut his own sentence short. Ford looked up, peering past the bars. The floating black pyramid seemed closer, now, looming huge and menacing in the sky ahead.

For the first time, she turned her attention to their surroundings beyond the bars that held them in. Ford didn’t recognise the land they were driving through as part of the town or the surrounding forests - they seemed to have been abruptly transplanted to a red-dust desert scattered with the occasional ruins scrawled with ominous graffiti featuring Bill's single, watchful eye, the heat rising off of the barren ground stifling even from her position above it. Clouds of dust kicked up by the vehicles that flanked them made it difficult to see much, but it appeared that they were in the middle of a convoy of heavily-modified cars and trucks, covered in spikes and graffiti and a truly improbable array of weaponry. Ford thought she caught a glimpse of the water tower stalking on stilt-legs off to their left, but through the dust and the huge, multicoloured bubbles that hung heavy in the air, she couldn’t quite be sure.

The shattered, elliptical dome of a long building rose out of the dust on their right, and Dipper perked up, crossing the cage to look out between the bars at it. "Hey, that's the mall! Oh man, I didn't even recognise this part of town, Bill really did a number on -"

He stopped, mid-sentence, and nearly shoved his face in between the bars. "Did you see that?!"

Ford hurried over to Dipper's side, staring intently out at the wasteland. She didn't see anything beyond the clouds of dust, the slow roll of the giant bubbles, the single Jeep bristling, hedgehog-like, with spikes flanking them -

Ford blinked.

“Wasn’t there another vehicle -” she started, just as a slender, dark shape flew straight out of one of the enormous bubbles and landed in a crouch on top of the spiny Jeep. Ford watched in amazement as the figure grabbed the frame of the Jeep, kicked up into a handstand, spun 180 degrees, and swung down feet-first through the window, their feet colliding with the driver’s head. The Jeep swerved violently, veered right, then left, then -

“Look out!” Ford shouted, grabbing Dipper and dropping into a crouch just as the Jeep collided, heavily, with the side of the truck they were in. Long, wicked black spikes shot between the bars of the cage, one slicing through the air where, just seconds before, Dipper’s head had been. The truck shuddered at the impact, knocking Ford off her feet and onto the floor of the truckbed. She managed to pick herself back up just as the Jeep slammed into the truck again. 

This time, she didn’t try to get back up.

Shouts from the cab and from the vehicles on their left told Ford that she and Dipper weren’t the only ones who’d noticed the strange figure that had hijacked the Jeep. There was a rumble and a squeal, and the truck slowed, the Jeep and the two flanking vehicles speeding past it as the driver braked, hard. 

“Get us outta here!” Gideon squawked, from the front seat, his voice piercing even over the screech of tires and the shouts coming from the other vehicles. “We gotta get these three to Bill by any means necessary -”

“Way ahead of you, boss,” the driver rumbled, and the truck spun back in the direction it had come, throwing Ford and Dipper both up against the bars. The back of Ford’s head cracked against the metal, causing both to ring and stars to splash in front of her eyes for a second, the sharp smell of copper filling the back of her nose and mouth. She gingerly raised a hand to touch the back of her head, but there was thankfully no blood. 

The truck shot back down the street the way it had come, thumping and rattling over the rough ground. Behind them, Ford watched, with a sinking feeling, as the two other vehicles from their little convoy - a police car with a sheriff’s star inscribed with Bill’s eye spray-painted over the legend on its side and a motorcycle with, somehow, seven wheels - boxed in the spiny Jeep. Whoever their strange assailant was, there seemed to be little doubt that Gideon’s henchmen would make short work of them.

She was just testing the bars that the Jeep had slammed up against for any sign of weakness when the truck suddenly jerked to a halt, right in the middle of the road. Dipper gasped, and then, did the last thing Ford would have expected.

He burst out laughing.

Ford straightened up, peering through the back window of the truck to look out the windshield and see what had forced them to stop. She had to blink several times, trying to make sure there wasn’t simply something in her eye. Even in an apocalyptic wildnerness of Bill’s creation, it still strained credulity to look up and see an enormous set of four wheels, taller than a man (had those come off a _tractor_?), and, perched on top of an equally hulking chassis like a tiara on the head of a Xenophorian thunderbeast, the body of a golf cart.

“What...?” she asked, and Dipper, beaming from ear to ear, jabbed a finger at the driver of the golf cart, a squat figure also all in black. As Ford watched, the figure unwrapped a scarf from around their face - 

\- and waved.

It wasn’t just any golf cart, Ford realised, belatedly. The red-and-yellow flags dangling from the roof and the huge, red question mark painted across the nose clearly marked it as the golf cart from the Mystery Shack. 

“ _Soos_?” she asked, at the same time as Gideon, from the front seat, let out a petulant whine.

“Am I supposed t’know who that is?”

“Soos!” Dipper yelled, jumping up and down and waving his arms, even though Ford doubted the handyman could see him from the angle he was looking down at the truck from. “We’re down here!”

There was no way that Soos could have heard them from all the way up in the golf cart, perched so high above the street, over the rumble and roar of engines, but still, Ford felt inexplicably warmed when he reached out and gave them a thumbs-up.

The golf cart started to roll, ponderously, forwards. 

The truck lurched back into motion, screeching backwards away from the approaching golf cart, and executed a neat three-point turn before squealing away down the street. Or rather, it started to - but the street was barricaded by the cop car, flipped up onto its side to expose its undercarriage. 

"Just go over it!" Gideon shouted, from the cab of the truck. "What's the use of havin' a monster truck if ya don't crush anythin' with it?!"

The driver didn’t move. A second later, Ford could see why.

The slim black figure that she’d seen take over the Jeep straightened up, balancing precariously on the upturned edge of the cop car. They planted their feet shoulder-width apart and their hands on their hips, head thrown back in obvious defiance, their whole being the physical embodiment of a challenge.

Behind them, the golf cart’s horn tooted, a sound that was honestly much more ominous than it had any right to be.

The truck’s engine growled, low and throaty, the floor under Ford’s feet thrumming like some great, caged beast eager to be set loose on some unsuspecting small herbivore. The dark figure stood still atop the cop car, unmoving. Apparently unafraid.

“Ghost Eyes!” Gideon snapped, and the truck roared to life, leaping forward. 

The spiked grate on the front of the truck rammed into the cop car’s exposed undercarriage just as the figure in black jumped. They somersaulted in midair, landing with knees bent on the hood of the truck as it started to climb up and over the toppled cop car. One hand went to its waist, and pulled free a short-handled axe.

The figure in black gave the axe a quick spin in one hand before slamming it down on the windshield. The instant the axe struck against it, the windshield splintered, spiderweb cracks shooting crazily outwards from the point of impact. The driver jerked the wheel hard to the left, but the cop car underneath the truck kept it stuck in place.

 Another blow, and the windshield shattered.

Gideon’s scream, Ford reflected, sounded remarkably like a stuck pig.

“Wendy!” Mabel yelled, throwing herself at the front of her cage, and the figure in black glanced up, waving through the windshield. The moment of distraction seemed to be enough, though, for the driver of the truck to reach through the windshield and punch the dark-clad figure in the side of the head. She toppled off the hood of the truck, vanishing behind the cop car.

“Go go go go go!” Gideon urged, and the driver obliged, stepping on the gas. The truck gave a furious whine, and Ford could feel the wheels spinning under her, but it didn’t move. Part of the cop car must have been wedged underneath it. "Get us outta here, before -"

A shadow fell over the back of the truck, blotting out the eerie red light, and Ford spun to see the golf cart, towering on its absurdly large wheels, bearing steadily down on them. She grabbed the bars of the cage behind her, shouting at Dipper, “Brace yourself!”

The crunch as the golf cart rammed into the back of the truck was nearly deafening. Ford could feel its reverberations through the soles of her feet, traveling up the bars she gripped. The whole truck rocked, wobbling precariously on its perch atop the upturned cop car.

“ _Soos_! What’re you _doing_?!” Dipper yelled, waving his arms, as the golf cart drew back.

“Hang in there, doods,” Soos called back, over the rumble of engines and the grinding squeal of metal against metal, his rodent-like face set in an expression of grim determination as he revved the engine for another run up on the truck. “I’m gettin’ you outta there!”

Screaming from the cab behind her told Ford that Wendy had most likely gotten back up. Ford paid the sounds no attention.

“Hit it again!” she called up to Soos, who saluted and stomped on the gas. The golf cart jerked forward, bumping into the cage at the very back of the truck, and there was another screech of metal on metal as the bars visibly bowed inwards. One more blow, and one of the bars shot free with a distressing little metallic sigh.

It wasn’t the only thing dislodged by the golf cart, though. With one final, drawn-out scream of metal, the truck slid forward off of the cop car’s undercarriage, teetering for a moment before its front wheels touched ground. The truck shot forward like a bolt from a crossbow, only to lurch to a stop again a moment later, bouncing forward in fits and starts. Ford realised she’d lost track of how many times now she’d been knocked off her feet.

“Give - me - that - key!” Wendy yelled from the cab, punctuated by soft percussive sounds rather like a gloved hand hitting a sack full of water. Gideon’s shrieks sounded remarkably like Mabel’s pig when someone stepped on its tail, Ford reflected, as she helped Dipper out through the hole Soos had made in the cage and down off the bed of the truck.

“Wendy! Dood, we got ‘em!” Soos called, as Ford climbed down off the truck bed herself. She had to stop and cling onto the bars with all her might as the truck gave one last aborted leap forward, then ground to a stop, the engine chugging down. Ford cautiously lowered a foot to the asphalt below her, and then, when the truck didn’t drag her forwards again, hopped all the way down. 

“Not yet!” Wendy shouted back, frustration clear in her voice. “Gideon’s got Mabel in an evil glowing birdcage, and he’s got the key _somewhere_.” Her voice dropped, and Ford assumed she was talking to the two in the front seat as she continued, “And this little creep is gonna tell me where it is. _Right. Now.”_

“No!” Gideon screeched, and Ford finally gave in to the temptation to circle around to the front of the truck, hoping for a better view of what was going on inside. The driver appeared to be out cold, probably felled by the blunt end of Wendy’s axe. Wendy herself had pulled off the dark hood she’d been wearing, revealing her face and her ginger hair, and was in the middle of - Ford blinked - giving Gideon a noogie. “ _I_  won this time! I _won_! Bill promised me -”

“Did he promise you Mabel’s heart?” Ford interjected, unable to help herself. “Because you should know that if he said that, he intends to drop the bloody organ in your hands after he removes it from her still-living body.”

Six pairs of eyes all fixed in Ford’s direction, identical perturbed expressions on each face. Ford managed, under the scrutiny, to shrug. “It’s his idea of a pun.”

She assumed the retching noise from the backseat of the truck was coming from Mabel.

Gideon struggled in Wendy’s grip, held as he was under one of her arms with her fist squashing his magnificent pompadour. “You’re a fool, Ford Pines,” he spat, pointing one finger like a brimstone-and-hellfire preacher passing judgement, though the effect was slightly spoiled by the fact that he was under four feet tall and currently being held like a small lapdog. “Bill Cipher coulda been a powerful friend to ya! But instead, you’ve made an even more powerful enemy.”

“What, you?” Dipper asked, sauntering over to Ford’s side. “Cause, uh, full offense, I saw you get taken down by a swarm of termites once.”

“ _Cursed_  termites!” Gideon wailed. “An’ I’ll unleash ‘em to plague you and your family even unto the seventh generation if you don’t tell this woman to _get her hands off my hair_!”

“Yeah, no such luck,” Wendy said, giving Gideon’s pompadour another vicious punch. It made a sad squeaking sound, and then slowly started to deflate, like a popped balloon. “Hand over that key!”

“No!” Gideon protested, kicking his little legs petulantly. “Mabel’s finally mine! You’re not takin’ her away from me again!”

“What? Nobody’s ‘taking’ me anywhere!” Mabel protested, from the back seat. “Ugh! As soon as I get out of this dum-dum cage, you’re in for a world of hurt, Gideon! And that’s a promise!”

“Yep,” Dipper said, stuffing his hands in the pockets of his puffy vest and giving Gideon a look that was entirely too pleased with itself. “It definitely sounds like she’s madly in love with you."

“She’ll learn to love me!” Gideon yowled, and Wendy had to let go of the remnants of his pompadour to pin him with both arms so he couldn’t wriggle free. “She’ll have an eternity of captivity to come to her senses and see we’re meant to be -”

“It won’t be eternity,” Ford interjected, over the sharp inhale from Mabel and Dipper’s almost audible fuming. “This dimension has been doomed from the moment Bill Cipher opened that rift. I give it maybe a week - less if Bill keeps warping things, dragging things through from the Nightmare Realm, and widening the rift - before it grows too unstable to sustain its own existence and collapses, taking everyone and everything inside of it with it.”

There was a moment of silence, broken only by a distant, inhuman screech.

“Bill didn’t mention that,” Gideon muttered.

“That’s because he’s a lying dirtbag who just says what he thinks you want to hear to get you to do stuff for him.” Dipper said. “Kinda like a dude on a dating website.”

“And it doesn’t matter anyway!” Mabel piped up, her voice high with righteous fury. “Because I don’t care how long you keep me stuck in a stupid cage, or a stupid dream, or a stupid fancy restaurant where they kill the lobsters in front of you, _I am never ever ever gonna date you_! I don’t know what part of this is so hard for you! Do I have to do an educational and inspiring musical number?”

“What do I have ta do!?” Gideon exploded right back at her, waving a fist. Wendy scowled halfway between annoyance and discomfort, trying to hold him in place. “I tried bein’ a gentleman! I courted you proper! I removed the obstacles your family placed in our path -”

“You mean you tried to steal my grunkle’s house and kill my brother!” Mabel shouted back.

Gideon ignored her, raising his own voice slightly as he ploughed onwards. “Why won’t you give me just one more chance? Mabel, I promise I’d be good ta you -”

“You put me in a _cage_! And not the cool kind you can dance in!”

“Just for now!” Gideon protested. “Just until ya love me!”

“I already told you, that is never happening!”

“What d’you want from me? I’ve tried everything!” 

“You haven’t tried being a decent guy!” Ford had known Mabel long enough, now, to recognise the crack running through her anger, the dangerous wobble that meant she was close to tears. “You haven’t tried listening to me. I just want you to leave us alone! I just want you to leave me  _alone_!”

The silence that followed felt like a shoe on the wrong foot, or a sixth finger squeezed into a five-fingered glove - awkward, uncomfortable, and only growing worse with time.

“Dude,” Wendy said, to Gideon, finally. “Key or no key, I am _so_ tempted to just drop-kick you right now.”

“Mabel’s right,” Dipper said, and Ford noticed that the smug look had disappeared from his face, probably the moment Mabel’s voice had started to wobble. “Look. Gideon. You’ve tried everything you can think of to force Mabel to like you, and it’s always backfired. What’ve you got to lose by listening to her for once?”

“Wh- she wanted us to just be friends!” Gideon protested, and perhaps only Ford caught the way Dipper’s stare went hard.

“What, being Mabel’s friend is a bad thing?”

Gideon seemed to struggle for words for a moment, his face growing redder and redder. “Well...no, but -”

“I think Mabel’s a pretty good friend.” Dipper glanced up at Mabel’s cage, and smiled. “Scratch that. Mabel’s an _awesome_ friend. You’d be lucky to have a friend like her. And if someday she decides she likes you as more than a friend?” He shrugged, with both hands still in his vest pocket. “That’s up to her, not you. If there’s one thing I’ve learned this summer, it’s that you can’t make somebody love you.”

Ford got the strangest impression that Dipper was looking a little over Gideon’s head, closer to Wendy’s face, when he said, “All you can do is try to be somebody worth loving.”

In the ensuing silence, the driver of the truck let out a soft grunt and twitched. Ford held her breath until the man stopped moving again.

“Well, my my, what a touchin’ speech,” Gideon said, but his usual sickly-sweet sarcasm seemed as deflated as his hair. His gaze turned in Mabel’s direction, and Mabel sighed heavily, rolling her eyes.

“I’m not going to start being your friend again just because you stop trying to murder my family and make me your queen or whatever. You were a _major_  jerky-jerk-jerkface to me, and Grunkle Stan, and Dipper, and - and everybody!” She gave another deep, heavy sigh. “ _But_ , if you really do start listening to me, and treating people better, and stop being such a mean jerk...I guess maybe then I could reconsider.”

She raised a hand, one finger extended, like a judge passing down a very important sentencing, and the stars swimming in Gideon’s eyes abruptly shrank. “But! You better show me some rehabilitation first, mister!”

“So wait, am I drop-kicking this dude or what?” Wendy asked. “Cause it’s getting super weird to keep holding him like this.”

Dipper’s gaze flicked over to Gideon, as did Mabel’s. Ford could see sweat beginning to bead on Gideon’s forehead. 

“I -” he started, and then hung his head, dangling limply from Wendy’s grip. His voice dropped in volume until it was nearly inaudible. “I’m in it deep with Bill. You don’t know what he’d do ta me -”

“Actually, we do,” Ford spoke up, and Gideon started, like he’d almost forgotten she was there. “Or at least, I do. I know how much this is to ask of you - I’ve been fighting Bill for the last thirty years.” She gestured ruefully at the wasteland around them, trying to tamp down the burn of the embarrassed flush that started to creep its way up her neck. “You can see how that turned out. But - it’s not too late. Help us send Bill back to his own forsaken realm, reverse the damage he’s done, and save our world.”

Gideon took another long, lingering look in Mabel’s direction.

“Also,” Ford added, folding her hands behind her back, unable to keep the echo of a smile from her face, “I have it on good authority that chicks dig heroes.” 

Gideon didn’t look away from Mabel, until Mabel, visibly uncomfortable, tugged the turtleneck of her sweater up over her face.

“Y’all really think it’s not too late?” he asked, sounding, for the first time, like the child he was.

“To stop Bill? Not as long as I live and breathe,” Ford said, curling the fingers of her right hand so tightly into a fist that her nails bit painfully into the heel of her hand.

“No, I mean -” Gideon gave his head a little shake. “Well, for me. To change.”

Dipper shuffled his feet in the dirt, glancing up at Ford.

“If there’s one thing _I’ve_  learned,” Ford said, shooting her great-nephew a smile before turning back to Gideon, “it’s that it’s never too late to change.”

Gideon drew in a long, deep breath, and let it out slowly, staring at the ground.

“All right,” he said, finally, thrusting his chin defiantly forwards. “Let’s go save the world!”

“Great,” Wendy said. “Now can I put him down?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I figure the barrier works on the same principle as Ford's metal plate - Bill can't pull any monkey business with people under its protection, sure, but that won't keep him out of your nightmares!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bill shows up again this chapter, and...if you've read any of my other stuff regarding Ford and Bill, this is going to be more of the same. Look out for emotional manipulation, victim-blaming, and other hazards of depictions of abusive relationships.
> 
> I _promise_ this is still a fix-it fic.

The labyrinth of mirrors is unnaturally silent.

Even though there’s no need to breathe in the mindscape, Ford’s imaginary lungs still burn the longer she holds her breath. She doesn’t dare make even the slight noise that drawing breath would produce. The mirror maze has held Bill at bay this long, but Ford knows all too well that it’s only a matter of time before Bill ploughs through her defenses like so much wet tissue paper.

She should never have invited him back into her mind.

...

The closer the black pyramid - or ‘Fear-amid’, as Ford had mentally begun to refer to it - loomed overhead, the quieter Dipper became. Ford could hardly blame him. The sight of the pyramid hovering ever closer filled her with a thick, sickening dread she’d only felt once before in her life, when the familiar light of the portal had appeared in the Nightmare Realm just when she’d been about to end Bill’s reign of terror, and she’d known, in the pit of her stomach, that somehow Bill Cipher had won again.

Ford and Dipper had returned to the cage in the back of the truck, the better to, hopefully, fool Bill into thinking they were still prisoners. Ford understood the reasoning, but that didn’t make the bars any less solid.

It would all be worth it, Ford reminded herself, again. When they destroyed Bill Cipher and banished his weirdness back to the Nightmare Realm, it would all be worth it.

“Do you think they’ll get back to the Shack all right?” Dipper asked, and Ford looked down to see him worrying the band of his hat in both hands. Ford managed a smile, though she had an uncomfortable feeling that it came out as more of a rictus.

“I wouldn’t worry about them. You saw how capably Wendy handled Gideon’s goons,” she said, and Dipper gave his hat a sharp twist, wringing it nervously.

“Yeah, but...Bill’s - I mean, we never even saw most of the stuff people told us was out here, and - and they don’t even know about most of it -”

“Dipper,” Ford interrupted, before Dipper could work himself up any further. “Wendy can take care of herself. And Soos...has a monster truck?”

Dipper let out a long breath, but the hat twisted between his hands didn’t unwind at all.

A blast of sound cut through the silence, and Ford spun to see Gideon leaning out the open window of the truck, blowing into an enormous curled horn, a little like a shofar. There was an answering rustle from somewhere far overhead, and a shadow fell over the back of the truck. A shifting, shimmering shadow, full of serrated edges. 

Bill’s eyebats were swarming towards them.

“Here we go,” Dipper said, looking up towards the descending cloud of eyebats. The shadows of their wings flickered ominously across his face.

“Here we go,” Ford agreed.

...

For a moment, as the eyebats lowered them down into the centre of the Fear-amid, Ford was nearly overwhelmed with a dizzying wave of familiarity. The angles were non-Euclidean, the curves obscene, the straight planes devouring their own tails, all in a void-dark shell which cracked in even bricks to reveal the neon rainbow of afterimages imprinted on a retina. 

It was a little slice of the Nightmare Realm made physical. It was the Quadrangle of Qonfusion, warped into Bill’s own image. It had no business being here. 

Bill looked up from his perch on his strangely-textured stone throne as the truck descended, and for a moment, a shock of cold shot through Ford, like she’d just swallowed a shot of liquid nitrogen. It felt as though Bill’s single eye was looking directly through her, straight into her head, plucking their carefully-laid plan from her thoughts.

The corners of Bill’s eye turned upwards in a familiar smile, and then - 

Ford had thought it had been awful to have Bill’s single eye trained on her, apparently helpless in a cage and relying solely on an ally who had, only hours before, been an enemy. She hadn’t realised that it could be worse.

It could be worse, and it _was_  worse, when Bill turned that gloating look on Dipper.

“WELL, WOULD YOU LOOK WHAT THE LITTLE WEIRDO WITH THE POMPADOUR DRAGGED IN!” Bill said, swivelling in his seat to kick his legs up onto one of the arms of the throne, leaning back against the other with one arm behind his head and the other holding out a shockingly purple martini. 

Another burst of cold raced up Ford’s spine as she realised what the throne was made up of. 

Bill seemed either not to notice her horror, or to be deriving some sick pleasure from pretending not to notice, as he crossed one leg over the other and poured his entire martini into his eye without blinking. The glass almost instantly refilled itself, and Bill waved it haphazardly at the descending truck, sloshing purple liquid onto the floor. “Y’KNOW, PINES FAMILY, WE COULD’VE GOT THIS OVER WITH A LONG TIME AGO IF YOU’D JUST DONE SOMETHING INTELLIGENT FOR ONCE AND SURRENDERED WHEN YOU HAD THE CH-”

And then there was an echoing _thump,_  and the Fear-amid’s walls shook.

Bill spun, and the music (if one could call it that) which had been playing abruptly cut off as the assortment of interdimensional criminals and nightmares that Bill laughably called ‘friends’ all stopped what they were doing to look for the source of the sound. 

They didn’t have to look long. There was another resounding _thump_ , that even Ford, still suspended in midair, could feel through the soles of her feet, and then dull reddish light flooded the interior of the Fear-amid as the head of an enormous Tyrannosaur punched through the wall and swallowed the weird amorphous shape which had been playing a macabre version of 'spin the bottle' in one bite.

For a second, no one moved.

Then the tyrannosaur was pulled back through the hole it had made, revealing a truly astonishing sight. Ford had seen the plans while they were being developed, so it didn’t come as a surprise exactly. But still, nothing could have prepared her for the majestic sight of the Shacktron, towering against the apocalyptic sky. 

The robot that the townsfolk had, under Fiddleford’s direction, transformed the Mystery Shack into lumbered forward. Ford caught a glimpse of Soos through the triangular window at the peak of the roof, but she didn’t see Wendy - until an eyebat swooped between the Shacktron and the hole in the Fear-amid wall, Wendy astride its back like a trick rider on a pony, aiming its paralysing eye-beam into the Fear-amid. As Ford watched, the beam caught one of the huge purple loaf’s toes, turning it to stone. The loaf jumped backwards with a crashing thump that shook the Fear-amid, before giving itself a shake and then charging out through the hole in the Fear-amid's side into thin air.

So far, everything appeared to be going according to plan. 

Bill’s shape turned an incandescent red as the Shacktron lined up another punch with the huge claw that was its other arm, and knocked another hole in the wall of the Fear-amid. “DON’T JUST STAND THERE GAWPING! MAKE LIKE XANTHAR, GET OUT THERE, AND TAKE CARE OF IT!” he snapped at the crowd of monsters, who all jumped, and then started scurrying for the holes in the wall. A beam of light shot from Bill’s eye towards the hole, and as each monster passed through it, spilling out of the Fear-amid, they started to grow in size until they were each nearly the size of the Shacktron.

Ford swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. Of course, the Shack was still protected by its unicorn-hair barrier. It didn’t matter how big Bill’s beasties were, when they couldn’t lay a finger on it anyway.

Still, she couldn’t help but feel a looming sense that things were about to go wrong. 

The last of Bill’s henchmaniacs disappeared out the side of the Fear-amid, and Bill’s eye twisted back around his face, to stare up at the descending truck from what had been his back a second before. His eye narrowed, and Ford felt her stomach drop through the soles of her boots. She squared her shoulders and straightened her back, trying to at least appear confident, even if she didn’t feel it. Dipper deserved at least that much from his hero, the Author.

“YOU GUYS SET THIS UP, RIGHT?” Bill asked, though Ford got the feeling it wasn’t really a question. “THINK YOU’RE PRETTY CLEVER THERE, SIXER? TELL ME, WHAT WAS THE PLAN? DISTRACT ME AND MY HENCHMANIACS WITH THIS LUMBERING HUNK OF JUNK, SO YOU CAN SNEAK IN PRETENDING TO BE PRISONERS AND RESCUE STANLEY WHILE MY BACK IS TURNED?”

“Uh, uh,” Dipper stammered. Ford gripped the bars of the cage, glaring up at Bill as the truck settled onto the floor. “Great-aunt Ford, what do we do now?”

“OH, IT’S A GREAT PLAN, KID!” Bill chirped, sloshing his martini in Dipper’s direction like he was toasting them. “IN FACT, WHY DON’T YOU TRY GOING THROUGH WITH IT ANYWAY! HERE, I’LL EVEN TURN MY BACK SO YOU GUYS CAN REALLY GIVE IT A SHOT!”

Ford didn’t expect him to actually turn his back. She didn’t move, except to step back in shock when the bars of the cage that she was holding suddenly dissolved in her hands. The cage vanished in a flurry of dust, the truck disintegrating underneath their feet, dropping its inhabitants all unceremoniously to the floor with a jarring thump. 

Before anyone had a chance to recover, Bill’s eye slid slowly back around his face, and he kicked his legs down off the arm of his throne to swivel his body around to match his eye.

"GO ON!" he said, and Ford was sure she wasn't imagining the mocking note in his voice. "I WON'T PEEK!"

"So I'm pretty sure this is a trap," Mabel said, picking herself up and dusting off her skirt and sweater. "But it's a trap that got me out of that stupid birdcage, so..." She held up both hands, palms up, like she was weighing something, and then shrugged.

“Gideon -” Dipper started, his hands balling into fists as he rounded on the other boy, but Gideon raised both hands and waved them back and forth as he stumbled backwards.

“Swear on my sherriff’s spurs, it wasn’t me! I didn’t say anything!”

Dipper lunged forward anyway, and Ford had to grab him by the collar to keep him from striking out at Gideon. “You little weasel, I knew we shouldn’t have trusted you -”

“Whoa, whoa!” Mabel said, stepping forward between Dipper and Gideon and holding out both arms as though she was holding them at arm’s length. “How is any of this helping us find Grunkle Stan?”

“YEAH, HOW IS ANY OF THIS HELPING YOU FIND GRUNKLE STAN?” Bill’s voice echoed from overhead, and Ford looked up to see Bill leaning his elbows on the arm of his throne, leaning his front plane into his hands and kicking his feet while he watched the scene below unfold with every sign of delight.

“What’s your game, Bill?” Ford asked, and Bill’s eye crumpled upwards at the bottom in an enormous grin.

“WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO KNOW!”

Ford sucked in a breath, trying to keep her voice level, trying not to betray herself in front of Bill. Anything that mattered, anything that he knew she cared about, she knew he’d only use against her, and yet - “What did you do with my brother, Bill?! Where’s Stanley? You monster, you -”

“Huh. Guess you really did miss me after all.”

Ford spun. In her periphery, she thought she saw the younger twins turn as well, but she didn’t have a thought to spare for them.

All her focus was directed on Stanley, who was standing behind her like he’d been there the whole time, leaning nonchalantly on his 8-ball cane.

“Stanley?” Ford asked, suddenly wary. This wouldn’t have been the first time Bill had crafted an illlusion of someone important to her in order to trick her somehow. And everything about this situation screamed ‘trap’.

Mabel, on the other hand, appeared to have no such compunctions. “Grunkle Stan!” she yelled, darting forward despite Dipper’s warning.

“No, Mabel, wait -”

It was too late. Mabel had already flung both arms around Stanley’s - or the thing that appeared to be Stanley’s - legs. Ford held her breath, waiting for ‘Stanley’ to dissolve or disappear or transform into a writhing mass of flesh filled with eyes and teeth. 

But all that happened was that a smile cracked across Stan’s face, and he reached down to give Mabel a pat on the shoulders. “Yup, it’s me, kiddo,” he said, and there was genuine warmth in his voice. “In the flesh, safe and sound.” Stan frowned, his voice turning stern, and he looked up at Ford as he added, “Mind telling me what _you_ kids are doing here?”

“Grunkle Stan, we’re rescuing you!” Mabel said, also turning to glare defiantly at Bill. “And we’re not gonna let any mean old triangles stop us!”

“OH, SHOOTING STAR, YOU’RE CUTE!” Bill said, leaning a little farther over the arm of his throne. “AND WE’RE GONNA HAVE TO HAVE A TALK ABOUT HOW YOU GOT OUT OF MY DREAMWORLD! BUT FOR RIGHT NOW...YEAH, SURE, YOU WON. GOOD GOING, KIDS! GIVE YOUR GRUNKLE A BIG HUG!”

Dipper looked up at Ford, and she could tell he was thinking the same thing she was. This was too easy. There was no way Bill would just let them walk out of here with Stan. There was some kind of trap just waiting for them to walk into its maw. 

Ford wished she could see its teeth.

"Mabel, sweetie," Stan said, gently prying Mabel off of his knees, "thanks for thinking of me, but - you just got yourselves trapped here too." He looked up, from Dipper to Ford, and shook his head. "You shoulda stayed in the Shack, where it was safe."

"So should you!" Dipper protested. "Grunkle Stan, what were you _thinking_?"

Stan shot them a tight, quick smile that didn't quite reach his eyes.

"Doesn't matter now, does it?" he said.

Ford started forwards toward her twin, and then stopped, her left hand curling into a fist at her side. "Stanley, what's going on?" she asked.

Stan gave his head another shake, darting a quick glance up at the stone throne. Ford followed his line of sight, just in time for a brilliant flash of light and a triumphant roar to come from outside. Bill, who had been peering over the arm of the throne, spun to face the holes in the side of the Fear-amid. It wasn't easy to read the body language of a giant triangle, but Ford thought he looked tense.

There was a high-pitched scream, and Bill let out a sigh. "JEEZ, DOES A GUY HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING HIMSELF AROUND HERE?" he asked the room in general, and then levered himself up from the throne. He paused a moment, looking down at the Pineses on the floor below, and it struck Ford suddenly just how enormous Bill's physical form was now, how completely he dwarfed them all. He could have ground any one of them under his heel like an ant.

The question nagged at the back of her mind: why hadn't he?

"DON'T YOU GO ANYWHERE!" Bill said, brightly, pointing a finger at the Pines family. Dipper yelped as four sections of the floor rose up around them, four enormous triangles wrought out of jagged, bluish metal that quickly clanged together into a pyramid with no discernible exit, trapping them all inside.

"AND YOU!" Bill thundered, turning his pointed finger in Gideon and his henchman's direction. "YOU'LL GET YOUR REWARD FOR CAPTURING THESE DANGEROUS OUTLAWS WHEN I'M DONE WIPING OUT THEIR GIANT MECH! FOR NOW, WHY DON'T YOU JUST...HANG AROUND!" He snapped his fingers, and a glowing blue net appeared around Gideon and his henchman, who both cried out and hugged each other as the net scooped them up and shot towards the ceiling.

Bill placed his hands where his hips would be if he were human, surveying the scene with every sign of satisfaction. Then he turned and stalked on four limbs that stretched just a little too long out through the hole in the Fear-amid wall.

Bill's last brick had barely slipped out of the Fear-amid when Stan grabbed Ford by the lapels of her trenchcoat, pulling her close. "Listen, we don't got much time before he comes back," he said, his voice hushed, casting a wary glance back over his shoulder. “D’you know anything about a - weirdness magnet?”

“Gravity Falls’ Natural Law of Weirdness Magnetism?” Ford asked, nonplussed. Stan snapped his fingers, a manic grin shooting across his face.

“Yeah, that’s the thing Bill was beakin’ about! Is there some kinda equation for it?” 

Before Ford could rattle it off (of course she knew it by heart, she was the one who’d developed it), Dipper interrupted, his eyes narrowed as he stared up at Stan. “What does that have to do with anything? Shouldn’t we be trying to find a way out of here?”

“That is our way outta here, kid,” Stan sighed, rolling his eyes as though it should be obvious. “Bill’s one real weakness is this weirdness magnet thingy, he said so himself. If Ford’s got the equation, then we can use it to take his...creepy mumbo-jumbo powers away, and -”

“Wait,” Ford interrupted, holding up a hand. “Bill told you that this equation was his weakness?”

“Well, not exactly _told_ ,” Stan said, bringing up a hand to rub the back of his neck. “More like I...overheard.”

Ford shook her head. 

“Bill doesn’t just - go around telling anyone his weaknesses,” she said. “Stanley, did it occur to you that Bill might be using you to obtain this equation for his own nefarious purposes?”

Stan folded his arms over his chest with a huff. “Think I’d know if some rube was conning _me_ , Sixer,” he grumped. “Besides. You got a better plan?”

Ford bit her bottom lip.

Dipper’s stare turned into a scowl, and he pointed a finger at Stan. “Great-aunt Ford, check his pupils! Maybe he’s possessed! Maybe he doesn’t even know! Maybe Bill’s secretly using him as a puppet to get information out of you and -”

“Dipper, how could you!” Mabel interrupted, throwing her arms out as if to protect Stan. “This is our _grunkle_!”

“And he’s acting really shady, Mabel! And we don’t know what's happened to him since we got you out of the mindscape!”

Stan met Ford’s eyes over the younger twins’ heads, shrugging one shoulder. 

“How ‘bout it?” he asked. “This could be our only chance, Sixer. Don’t you wanna save the world?”

Ford swallowed down the sudden lump of ice that wedged in her lungs.

“Since when do you care about saving the world?” she asked.

Stan sighed. And then he looked up, over Ford’s head.

“OKAY, THIS FAMILY REUNION FLUFF’S GETTING BORING,” Bill's voice echoed from behind Ford, and Ford instinctively pulled Dipper closer, dread falling over her like a suffocating veil as she spun to see the triangle looming over the throne. “TIME TO INTRODUCE SOME MORE CONFLICT!”

He snapped his fingers.

The pyramid-shaped cage collapsed back into the floor with a scream of metal. Mabel let out a yelp as a glowing blue net appeared around her, and tightened, abruptly yanking her up towards the ceiling. Ford just had time to look down and see another glowing net appear on the floor under her feet before it, too, pulled upwards, yanking her off her feet and dragging her and Dipper both up to hang suspended in midair. 

Ford had to flip over in the net to be able to see Bill, which led to a series of very undignified positions before she finally found herself flat on her stomach, peering down through the glowing blue cords. 

Bill was still sitting in his throne, his legs now propped against the arm, grating laughter pouring out of him and nearly drowning out the sounds of the battle outside.

And Stan was perched on the arm of the throne at Bill’s feet.

“OH, WOW,” Bill said, waving his martini glass in Ford’s direction. A strange weightlessness swept over her, and Ford barely had time to realise she was, indeed, airborne before she was dragged forward. One of the holes in the net opened to let her through, then shrank closed again behind her. A familiar red glow hanging around her told her, as though she didn’t already know, that this was Bill’s doing. “CAN WE GET A HAND FOR THE WORLD’S DUMBEST GENIUS?” 

Bill looked around, like he expected to hear applause, and then, seeming to realise that he’d sent his henchmaniacs out to fight the Shacktron, shrugged and turned back to Ford. “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU ACTUALLY FELL FOR THAT! SERIOUSLY, NOTHING SMELLED FISHY ABOUT IT TO YOU?”

Ford didn’t dare open her mouth. Instead, she locked eyes with Stanley, trying to convey, with all the force of her glare, just how furious she was. 

Stanley, she realised a little belatedly, was now also holding a martini glass. 

Bill seemed to notice where she was looking, and his eye crinkled up into a grin. “OH YEAH, SIXER, I FORGOT TO MENTION! I FOUND A NEW FAVOURITE PINES TWIN! AND PARTNER IN CRIME! TURNS OUT, WE’VE GOT SO MUCH IN COMMON!”

Ford’s eyes narrowed. Stan flashed her his biggest, sparkliest showman’s grin, and raised his martini glass.

“Grunkle Stan, he - he doesn’t mean what I think he means, does he?” Dipper’s voice asked, plaintive, from behind Ford, and she turned as best she could in midair to see him clinging to the net. 

Stan’s showman smile shifted, dipping a little before coming back full force. “Depends on what you’re thinkin’, kid.”

“You wouldn’t make a deal with Bill!” Mabel blurted, pressing her face into the glowing blue mesh of the net until it distorted her cheeks. “Grunkle Stan, tell me you didn’t!”

Stan shrugged, tucking his 8-ball cane under the arm with which he was holding the martini. 

“ ‘New favourite Pines twin’?” Ford repeated, her chest tight. There had to be some way out of this nightmare, if she could just think logically, but her skull seemed to be full of angry bees. “Very interesting, Bill. I wouldn’t have thought you’d have wanted anything to do with Stanley after he _shot your eye out_.”

Bill laughed, that awful nasal cackle, and threw an arm around Stan’s shoulders. “YEAH, YOU SURE GOT ME THAT TIME!” He squeezed Stan in close against his sloped side, slopping Stan’s martini all over his bow tie. “SURE WAS A PAIN TO REGROW! BUT HEY, THAT’S WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE SINCE ACE HERE SAW THE LIGHT!”

“ ‘Saw the light’?” Dipper spat, and Stan shook his head, his smile still huge but looking oddly fixed. 

“Hey, Poindexter here was right as usual. Bill’d already figured out how to get past that unicorn-hair barrier you dreamed up. I figure, who wants to be on the losing side?”

Ford opened her mouth to shout, and realised she didn’t have anything to say. What could possibly be worse than what Stanley had just admitted, himself?

Surprisingly, it was Mabel who spoke up. “Bill told you he could get into the Shack, Grunkle Stan?”

Stan’s smile dropped a few notches. “No, pumpkin. He showed me.” He gestured, and Bill waggled a finger in a circle, rotating Ford in midair so she could see Gideon, hanging in his own glowing blue net and looking wretched. “Actually, he had this little weasel and his henchmen drag me out kicking and screaming. Guess you were right about how pissed he’d be about the eye thing, Sixer."

Ford expected Mabel to be devastated. And, yes, she was wringing her hair in both hands the way she usually did when she was upset, but her eyes were wide, almost as though she’d just realised something.

“Grunkle _Stan_ ,” she started. “You -”

“Anyway, I told you it wouldn’t work,” Stan said, a little too loud, elbowing Bill in the angle. “My sister’s too smart.”

“YEAH, YEAH,” Bill said. “BET YOU COULDA GOT IT OUT OF HER IF YOU’D REALLY TRIED!” His eye swivelled back up to Ford as he said, “SHE’S A REAL PUSHOVER, YANNO!”

“Hey, I really tried!” Stan protested, and Bill laughed. 

“SUUUURE YA DID!” His voice dropped, as he pushed himself up out of the throne, rising into the air towards where Ford was floating, sinking into an octave that made Ford’s back teeth rattle and her vertebrae clatter against each other. “BUT NOW IT’S **MY TURN**.”

Stan started to say something, but it turned into a disgruntled shout as one of those glowing blue nets snatched him up into the air. And then Ford couldn’t see any more, because Bill’s single eye, looming, filled her vision. 

“HOW’S ABOUT IT, SIXER?” his voice thundered, as he leaned in until his pupil was nearly touching Ford’s nose. “ONE LITTLE EQUATION, AND THEN I LET YOUR PATHETIC FAMILY GO! SEEMS LIKE A PRETTY FAIR TRADE TO _ME!”_

For a second, Ford couldn’t move.

She’d had nightmares like this, ever since Stanley had opened the portal and dragged her back through, ever since she’d learned that she still _had_  a family. Nightmares where they burned in blue flames before her eyes, while she stood helpless, Bill’s cruel laughter ringing in her ears. Nightmares where their eyes flashed yellow, too late for her to stop the knives they drove into her back. Nightmares where the world crumbled around her, and she could only save one. 

Only nightmares, she’d told herself. Only nightmares.

“HEY, THIS IS A LIMITED-TIME OFFER!” Bill shouted, his voice almost shatteringly loud in Ford’s ears. “I’M GONNA GIVE YOU TO THE COUNT OF TEN, AND THEN I THINK MAYBE I’LL KILL ONE OF THEM!”

He gestured, drawing back, and the three nets holding Dipper, Mabel, and Stan all flew to his side. Bill snapped his fingers, and everything went dark, save for three spotlights illuminating each of the nets and the yellow glare coming off of Bill’s face. 

“TICK TOCK, SIXER!” Bill yelled, waving towards the nets, and the spotlights started to flash different colours as the pupil of his eye was replaced by symbols Ford recognised from the prophecy wheel - the shooting star, the pine tree, the strange crescent that looked a little like a fish - spinning one after the other like a slot machine. “ONE...TWO...”

“Hey, what happened to leaving them alone if I helped you?” Stan yelled, twisting in the net to face Bill’s spinning eye. That eye crinkled up at the edges, and Bill laughed. 

“OH, THAT WAS WHEN I THOUGHT YOU ACTUALLY COULD HELP ME!” Bill waved a hand dismissively. “GUESS SIXER WAS RIGHT, YOU REALLY ARE WORTHLESS! EXCEPT AS A HOSTAGE! SPEAKING OF WHICH, WAS I UP TO THREE OR FOUR? I’M THINKING FOUR!”

Dipper flung himself against the net, gripping it in both hands as he stared desperately out at Ford. “Grauntie Ford, don’t do it!”

“FIVE,” Bill said, cheerfully, his pupil spinning.

“There’s gotta be another way! You’re the Author! You have a plan!” Dipper’s face flashed blue, green, purple, bloody red as the light shifted, his eyes huge and pleading. “...Right?”

Ford couldn’t meet Dipper’s gaze.

“SIX!” Bill started, and then opened his eye very wide, holding a hand in front of it like he was yawning. “ACTUALLY, YOU KNOW WHAT, THIS IS GETTING BORING! **NINE!** ”

Ford sucked in a breath.

“I’m sorry,” she said. That lump of ice was back, filling her lungs, making it difficult to swallow, to breathe. “You deserve a better hero than me.”

Her hand barely shook at all when she held it out to Bill.

The spinning symbols in Bill’s eye and the flashing spotlights froze, the spotlights flaring back to a brilliant, blinding white. 

“JUST LIKE OLD TIMES, EH, FORDSY?” Bill cackled, reaching out for her hand. Ford snatched it back, tucking both hands behind her back. 

“First, you let them go.”

“IS THAT ALL?” Bill sneered, and snapped his fingers. 

In the split second before the nets vanished, Ford saw Stan mouth a single word. 

It looked like ‘stall’.

Then the nets vanished. Bill reached out a hand, ignoring the screaming as the twins and Stan plummeted towards the floor too far below, the lights coming back up as the spotlights faded. 

“HOO BOY! DID YOU SEE THE LOOKS OF BETRAYAL ON THEIR FACES? ACTUALLY, YOU KNOW WHAT, INSTANT REPLAY!” Bill said, his eye growing enormously wide again, flickering like a television screen before bringing up an image of Dipper’s face in the split second before the nets had fallen away. “LET’S DO THIS ONE AGAIN IN SLOW-MO -”

“Do you want this equation or not?” Ford demanded. Bill blinked, the image of Dipper’s face vanishing and his eye squeezing upwards at the bottom in a lazy smile.

“WOW, SIXER, WHEN’D YOU GET TO BE SUCH A BUZZKILL?” Bill feigned another yawn, patting his bottom eyelid with one hand. “YOU WERE WAYYY MORE FUN BEFORE YOU PUT THAT METAL PLATE IN YOUR HEAD!” He reached out with one finger and poked Ford, hard, in the side of her head. Ford tried, unsuccessfully, not to flinch. “BUT IF YOU’RE SURE YOU DON’T WANT TO SPEND ANY QUALITY TIME WITH YOUR OLD PAL BILL -”

“I’m very sure,” Ford interrupted. She took a deep breath, and then, before she could think better of it, reached out and grabbed Bill’s hand. “Let’s get this over with.”

Bill’s eye narrowed even further. Somehow, despite only having the one feature in the middle of his face, he managed to look like he was smirking.

“JUST LIE BACK AND THINK OF ENGLAND!” he boomed, and it was - strange, almost like he was overlaid on top of himself, and the familiar strangeness of sliding into the mindscape was creeping up her arm - “THIS’LL ALL BE OVER SOON.”

Bill’s single eye, etched on the air in jagged gold lines, filled Ford’s vision, and then - 

...

And now they’re here, both wandering the labyrinth of mirrors that Ford’s made of her mindscape.

Ford’s starting to regret the mirrors. They’d been her first thought, the first thing that had come to mind (hah!) when she’d tried to think of something to keep Bill at bay, but - she’s beginning to think her first thought might not have been her best thought. Every time she turns, her own face is looking back at her. She can’t decide if the expression she’s wearing is accusing or simply disappointed.

_Stall,_  Stanley had said. As though he hasn’t just proven that he can't be trusted. As though, due to his betrayal, this entire endeavour hasn’t been in vain from the very start. As though he expects Ford to listen to anything he has to say, ever again. 

She should have listened to her intellect, instead of letting her fear take control. Should have stuck with the truth she knew wouldn’t fail her.

_Trust no one_.

And yet, here she is, pouring all her concentration into maintaining the labyrinth of mirrors keeping Bill, for the moment, entrapped. _Stalling_. As though this will make any difference, in the end.

As though anyone’s coming back for her.

_Stall_ , Stanley had said. Ford doesn't know why, but she's stalling. After all, it's not as though she has many other choices.

"PRETTY IMPRESSIVE, FORDSY!" Bill's nasal shout echoes over the mirror maze, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. "YOU'RE FINALLY STARTING TO GET GOOD AT THIS WHOLE MINDSCAPE-MANIPULATION THING!" His voice drops, plummeting through the octaves until it reaches a booming bass that shakes the mirrored surface under Ford's feet. "BUT NOT AS GOOD AS  **ME**."

Ford had thought the mirrors surrounding her were shaking because of Bill's voice, but even after he stops speaking, the deep bass rumble that shivers the floor carries on. The surface of each of the mirrors buckles and ripples, like they're about to burst outwards into a billion shards. Ford throws up an arm, instinctively, to protect her eyes, and concentrates.

The mirrors' quivering slowly subsides, the glass stilling again. But - something's different. Something about each of the reflections surrounding Ford (trapping her in place) is, just subtly... _off_. This one seems a shade too pale. That one takes a heartbeat too long to meet her eyes.

Before Ford can react, they're reaching out for her. Arms burst from the mirrors' frames, bodies peeling themselves from their two-dimensional glass prisons like clones from copier paper. Ford envisions herself an entropic catalyser, firing off shot after shot, and images of herself age instantly into dust before her eyes. But there are simply too many, and they keep coming, clawing and clasping and pinning her down, smothering her alive in a sea of possible selves -

Ford shuts her eyes, and changes the script.

When she opens her eyes again, the other Fords are frozen in place, like an army of mannequins. Ford blasts away the ones holding her down and carefully pushes herself up into a crouch. She half-expects them to lunge for her, suddenly, but none of them move. 

At first cautiously, and then with abandon, Ford blasts away the rest of the reflections, leaving her alone and breathing hard in the corridor which is now lined with empty panes of silvered glass. She grips the entropic catalyser in both hands, scanning what little she can see around the maze’s twists and turns. Maybe it’s nothing but a figment of her own imagination, but the blaster’s weight feels both real and reassuring in her hands.

Ford realises, with a start, that she’s no longer sure where Bill is. 

As the thought crosses her mind, she thinks she catches movement out of the corner of her eye. Ford spins, her finger tightening on the trigger before she’s even halfway turned to face it. 

The blast from the entropic catalyser takes out a mirror, a reflection of Bill’s single eye splintering and vanishing as the mirror shatters. Laughter rings through the maze, and the cosmos that swallow the space where the mirror had stood swirl agitatedly. 

Yellow light flashes past on Ford’s left, and even though a logical part of her mind screams that she’s being baited, she’s still conjured another blaster into her left hand and fired off a bolt before her brain can catch up with her arm. Another mirror bursts into shards, another hole opens up into darkness stirred with stars. The laughter echoes, growing in resonance, building upon itself until Ford drops her blasters to clap both hands over her ears. It doesn’t help. The laughter keeps building.

And then, it stops.

Ford dares to straighten up. As she’d almost expected, Bill is hovering in front of her, hanging like a hallucination, too big and too bright as ever, too real against the dream-background of the mindscape. So still and geometrically perfect, as though etched into the very air, he looks like a hieroglyph, like the icon of some forgotten and blasphemous religion. His eye is narrowed in a smile, but his gaze still pierces straight through Ford like a pin through a particularly interesting specimen of _lepidoptera_. 

“JUST LIKE OLD TIMES,” Bill says, his voice deep and layered with satisfaction, and Ford has to shut her eyes. 

The weight of the blaster that appears in her hand is reassuring, like an old friend. She brings it up in one smooth motion and fires, point-blank, into Bill’s single eye.

Bill’s pupil opens up, wide, gaping, a black hole, a portal into a lightless universe, and swallows the bolt. A second later, the bolt materialises again behind him, as though it’s passed right through him, and collides with the mirror just behind him.

The mirror cracks, with a sound like a gunshot, right across its face.

And then, with a deafening roar, the entire maze is exploding. Shards of disintegrating glass fill the air with deadly silver glitter, twinkling like spilled galaxies and tearing at Ford’s skin. The floor cracks and crazes madly under her feet, before it, too, shatters. 

Ford expects to fall, but instead, finds herself floating. Around her, bright beads of blood and shards of glittering glass form themselves into nebulae, constellations. Darkness spreads out, vast and infinite, on all sides. There’s nothing left of Ford’s carefully-constructed maze - only Bill, still too real and too bright and too undeniable, and Ford herself, and the endless, open expanse of her mindscape. 

“WELL, THAT WAS FUN,” Bill says, drifting forward. He’s back to the size he usually would have appeared when he visited Ford in her mindscape, all those long years ago when she still thought he was her friend. Just the thought makes her feel like she’s choking. “BUT MUCH AS I LOVE PLAYING GAMES WITH MY FAVOURITE - WELL, OKAY, SECOND-FAVOURITE PINES TWIN, I’VE GOT AN ODDPOCALYPSE TO TAKE GLOBAL! SO! HOW’S ABOUT THAT EQUATION?!” There’s an edge of threat in his voice as he crosses his little black noodle arms over his frontal plane, kicks his little black noodle feet up onto a footstool he conjures out of nowhere. 

It’s the mindscape. Ford doesn’t have a mouth to be dry, and yet, it’s suddenly hard to swallow. 

“You want -” Ford’s voice cracks on her first attempt, and she has to clear her throat before she tries again. “You want to take Weirdmageddon global? I thought you’d already conquered this dimension, what more could you possibly want?”

Bill rolls his eye, conjuring a martini out of nothing and flipping his eye over into a mouth in order to take a long drink. “YEESH. WELL, I DON’T LIKE TO ADVERTISE IT, BUT - WE HAVEN’T EXACTLY GOT THE RUN OF YOUR PUNY LITTLE DIMENSION. _YET_! BUT TRUST ME, AS SOON AS YOU HAND OVER THE KEYS TO THIS GROTTY LITTLE **PRISON**  OF A TOWN THAT’S BEEN KEEPING US TRAPPED, WE’LL REALLY SHOW THIS DIMENSION OF YOURS HOW TO PARTY!”

Ford has to bite her tongue at the sudden burst of blinding hope that flares in her chest. It’s almost instantly smothered when Bill looks at her over the rim of his martini glass, and she remembers.

There _was_  hope for her world. And she stepped on it without a second thought, turned her mind over without so much as the first step of a plan. What did she _do_? What has she done?

What else could she have done?

Bill’s eye flicks up at the sound of a familiar whir, and Ford turns, to see the portal’s blue-white eye slowly fizzling out behind her, its triangular frame crashing to its side before she forces it to dissolve into a stream of bubbles. 

When she turns back to face Bill, his eye is crumpled up in a knowing smile.

Bill tips his martini glass in Ford’s direction, and it refills itself automatically. “AW, FEELING NOSTALGIC, FORDSY?” He blinks, once, with a little more force than necessary, and Ford wishes she didn’t know it was Bill’s idea of a wink. 

“Did Stanley know?” she asks. It’s like peeling open a wound that’s barely scabbed over, she knows, worrying at it like this will only make it hurt more and take longer to heal, but - “Did he know what you wanted the equation for?”

“YOU MEAN DID HE KNOW YOUR STUPID, PUNY WEIRDNESS MAGNETISM FIELD WAS KEEPING MY GLORIOUS CHAOS CONTAINED?” Bill asks, kicking one foot up over the other and taking another sip of his martini. “BETTER QUESTION, SIXER, WHY DO YOU _CARE_? HE BETRAYED YOU! SOLD YOU OUT! TO _ME_! THAT’S GOTTA STING, RIGHT?”

When Ford doesn’t respond immediately, Bill pouts, jutting out his bottom eyelid grotesquely. “SHEESH, FORDSY, IS IT THAT METAL PLATE MAKING YOU SUCH A WET BLANKET, OR WERE YOU JUST ALWAYS SUCH A DRIP?” He lets out a deep sigh, tossing the martini glass aside as he straightens up. The martini glass and the footstool both vanish into swirls of stars as Bill advances on Ford, gripping her face in both hands. “ENOUGH MESSING AROUND! YOU’RE GOING TO HAND OVER THE EQUATION AND GET ME OUT OF THIS PODUNK BACKWATER, OR I’M GONNA BE _REALLY_  UNHAPPY! AND IF YOU BREAK YOUR END OF OUR DEAL...”

Bill lets go of one of Ford’s cheeks to snap his fingers. Even knowing that the images of Dipper and Mabel that appear behind each of his shoulders are nothing but illusions doesn’t stop Ford’s heart from nearly bursting from her chest. 

_“Hey, what happened to leaving them alone if I helped you?”_

Ford sucks in a deep breath. 

_Stall_.

“You know,” Ford says, before she can think better of it, “I’ve been thinking.” She has to pause to lick her lips before she can go on, her words scraping like sandpaper against her throat. “About what you said before Stan shot you in the eye.”

Bill scowls. “OH, DON’T REMIND ME!”

“No, I -” There’s a tight band wrapped around her chest, making it hard for Ford to find the air, but she manages to spit the words out before it can cut off her breath completely. “Bill, I think you had a point.”

Bill goes still. It’s not the same dangerous stillness Ford knows well, just before he does something vicious. She dares to think that maybe, for once, she’s really surprised him.

“What you said about your friends. About me fitting in,” Ford presses on, the band around her chest easing just enough with every word to let her squeeze the next one out. “I...can’t deny it any longer. Even my own twin brother would rather side with the monster who destroyed his home than with me.” She reaches up, not daring to take her eyes from Bill’s as she adjusts her glasses on her nose. “This world’s moved on without me. There’s no place for me here, not anymore.” 

She has to pause for breath before she adds, “I’m not sure there ever was.”

Bill, finally, seems to unfreeze, his eye opening wider as though raising his eyebrows in disbelief.

“And - I’m as much an interdimensional criminal as any member of your gang,” Ford pushes on, a little defensively. She realises too late that Bill’s silent shaking is a precursor to laughter, and scowls. “All right, so maybe I was only wanted throughout the multiverse because of _you_ , but -”

Bill reaches up, brushing an imaginary tear from his eye as he bursts into laughter. “AH HAH HA! OH, WOW, WHAT A 180! WHAT’S THAT LITTLE MANTRA YOU’VE BEEN USING FOR THE LAST, OH, THIRTY OR SO YEARS? OH YEAH!” His eye snaps open again, and he stares directly into Ford’s face. “ **TRUST NO ONE.** WANNA GIVE ME ONE GOOD REASON WHY I SHOULD BELIEVE YOU?”

Ford swallows, hard. 

It takes what feels like a Herculean effort, but she manages to raise a hand. One of the nebulae scattered against the night sky of her mindscape uncoils, swirling after her hand like bubbles following a hand dragged through water.

And, slowly, it forms itself back into the shape of a mirror.

Bill’s eye darts over towards the movement, then back to Ford’s face. When he seems to realise it isn’t a trick, he turns towards the mirror, and lets out one surprised shout of laughter. He looks from Ford, to her reflection, and back to Ford, his yellow glow so bright it extends inches from his little triangular body.

“SO _THAT’S_  WHY YOU CAME CRAWLING BACK, HUH?” he yells, conjuring a cane from nowhere to yank Ford around to face her own reflection. “A GUY GETS A LITTLE POWER IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD, AND SUDDENLY YOU’RE ALL OVER HIM!”

Ford studies the bottom of the ornate golden frame surrounding the mirror. It’s elaborately carved, with a design that, she now realises, resembles the knots in the trunk of a birch tree. Or eyes.

Bill’s cane taps under her chin, forces her eyes upwards. 

Her own reflection is everything she remembers. 

“HEY, I CAN’T BLAME YOU!” Bill says, settling onto her shoulder. One of his arms wraps, almost companionably, around her neck. He squeezes just a little too hard for the gesture to be friendly. “I’M A POWERFUL GUY! AND HEY, ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS ASK!”

He snaps his fingers.

It’s not the first time Bill’s transfigured her, in the mindscape. It is the first time he’s bothered to make a show of it. A single comet shoots across the imaginary night sky overhead, only to spiral down and around Ford, from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. Its tail bleeds glitter down around her like icing on a cake. Like something from a fairy tale. 

Ford has to steel herself before she dares to look down.

Her old clothes are gone. A gown that looks like it was sewn from the cosmos swirling around them adorns the old familiar shape she’d once come to know as herself, fanning out around her with the slightest movement as though she’s dancing. She looks up, and there are comets dangling from her twenty-eight-year-old self’s ears, the belt of Orion strung as a choker around her delicate neck and spilling Pleiades down her décolletage. 

The girl in the mirror glitters, and twirls, and smiles.

It’s suddenly difficult for Ford to swallow past the lump sitting leaden in her chest.

Bill, still perched on her shoulder, gives her cheek a pat. “WHAT D’YOU SAY, FORDSY? Y’KNOW, I’LL TAKE THAT EQUATION FROM YOU EITHER WAY, BUT IT’D BE WAYYYY MORE FUN TO GET THE BAND BACK TOGETHER!” He pops back up into the air, his little limbs spread akimbo in apparent excitement. “AND THIS ISN’T ALL WE COULD DO! HAVEN’T YOU EVER WANTED TO REMAKE THE WORLD IN YOUR IMAGE? MAKE IT _BETTER_? YOU CAN DO THAT! _WE_  CAN DO THAT!”

Ford...has spent the last thirty years of her life trying to save this world. She’s stalling, not seriously considering this. She’s not swayed by the false promises of a _liar monster snappy dresser_ who’d fooled her once before. 

But...

She swishes the skirt of her gown, and her reflection, all grace and beauty, does the same.

Bill’s eye crinkles upwards, and he dips close to Ford’s ear, as though he’s whispering into it. “HEY, AND IF YOU WON’T DO IT FOR YOURSELF...WHAT ABOUT FOR THE KID?”

Ford blinks. The comets dangling from her reflection’s ears wink, twin flashbulb-pops of light. “For the kid?”

Bill’s glow grows brighter.

“YEP! YOU CARE ABOUT THOSE UNFORMED HUMAN TADPOLES, RIGHT? DON’T YOU WANT PINE TREE TO GROW UP IN A KINDER WORLD THAN YOU DID?” Bill swoops around Ford’s head, so she has to turn to follow him. “DON’T YOU WANT TO MAKE THINGS _BETTER_  FOR HIM?”

“I...” Ford starts, and realises she has no idea what comes afterwards.

“IT’LL BE SO EASY!” Bill chirps in her other ear, and Ford realises he’s split himself into two. _Twins_. “ALL YOU GOTTA DO IS HAND OVER THAT EQUATION, AND LET ME HAVE YOUR STUPID, UGLY, MESS OF A WORLD! I’LL MAKE IT _SO MUCH BETTER_. WE’LL MAKE IT BETTER TOGETHER! AND MUCH MORE FUN! AND THEN, WHEN WE’RE DONE WITH IT, WE’LL FIND A NEW ONE, AND WE’LL DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN!”

Ford looks up, and meets her reflection’s eyes.

But it’s not the reflection of the twenty-eight-year-old girl in the glittering galactic gown. Ford realises, after a moment of disorientation, that she’s looking, not into a dream, but into a memory. The shabby hallway of the Shack serves as a backdrop for a Ford who’s only a handful of days younger, and most certainly not robed in starlight. Her heavy old black boots are covered in mud from traipsing around between dimensions, her hair is a wild puff of unmanageable curls rather than a sleekly styled pixie cut, her shoulders are broad and her chest flat under the rough purple wool of her sweater, the mascara darkening her lashes almost disappearing in the lines around her eyes.

But the apprehensive smile on her face is hopeful, even happy.

A rush of warmth suddenly wraps around Ford, and she looks down, to find herself wearing the purple sweater. It’s not _bad_ \- it could have been a much more aggressive purple, but it’s darker, more muted, closer to an eggplant colour than the eye-searing neon Mabel had favoured, and there is no glitter anywhere to be seen.

The legend “World’s #1 Great-Aunt!” springs off the chest in bold white lettering. It’s reversed in the mirror, but that’s never kept Ford from reading anything.

It looks ridiculous over the dress cut from the cosmos. Ford’s never seen anything quite so beautiful in her whole life.

She looks up, and the mirror flies apart into a million billion particles, dispersing into the air. Bill starts, his split selves warping back into one as he glares down at Ford. She stares defiantly back, even though her heart is hammering in her chest. 

“I’m never joining you,” Ford says, as clearly and as slowly as she can manage. There must be wool in this sweater; it feels almost as though it’s radiating warmth. “And I’m never helping you. Ever. Again.”

Bill’s eye narrows, his triangular shape slowly burning red against the darkness of the universe, and Ford starts when she realises the stars scattered around her mindscape are going out, one by one. “OH, YOU’LL HELP ME ALL RIGHT, STANFORD PINES! STARTING WITH THAT EQUATION! OR HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN THAT WE HAD A **DEAL**?”

Ford takes a deep breath.

“I’ll burn my own mind down with you inside it before I let you have that equation,” she says. She can see light coming off of the sweater, now. It’s almost too hot to touch. And she can feel...something. A warm pressure, against each of her hands. “And - it’s only Ford, now.”

Bill cringes back from the light coming off Ford’s sweater, throwing up a hand to cover his eye. He tries to flippantly snap a single-eyed pair of sunglasses into existence over his face, but they bleed away like a watercolour someone’s dragged their sleeve through.

“WHAT. ARE. YOU. DOING?” Bill demands, growing abruptly in size until he fills the horizon, angry red with his single eye burning black in the very centre of his triangular form. “WHAT IS THIS?”

Ford doesn’t move, doesn’t flinch even when Bill slams an enormous fist down just next to her. He stares at it in disbelief, then at her, then at his fist again. Ford is somehow certain he’d meant for it to land on her.

The light is pouring off of her, now, that warm pressure against her hands solid and firm. Bill’s fist streaks and bleeds away like his sunglasses had, and for the first time since they’d met, Ford thinks she sees real fear in his single eye. 

“ **STOP THIS**!” Bill yells, his voice shaking the handful of remaining stars overhead and below. Ford can feel it rattling in her bones, but the grip holding each of her hands stays steady and strong. For an instant, all of Bill’s bricks seem to reverse themselves, his eye glitching out into a static fuzz. The echo in his voice rises to a shrill buzz. “ **YOU CAN’T -”**

The rest of whatever he had been about to say is swallowed by a crescendo of white noise, the light boiling around him and through him. Through the blaze of brilliance, Ford can just make out a series of shapes, twisted and painful just to look at, somehow crossing through more dimensions than the human eye can comprehend, every so often broken by a glimpse of yellow brick or the pupil of a single, staring eye - 

Then the light burns even brighter, and everything goes white.

...

When Ford comes to, she’s holding hands with a stranger.

A teenager, to be entirely accurate, complete with stringy dyed-black hair and pimples. And a hooded sweatshirt marked with a symbol that looks...strangely familiar.

Ford looks up. She’s on her knees on the floor of the Fear-amid, and all around her, forming a ring with their held hands, are strangers. No - not exactly strangers. She picks out Stan’s handyman, Pacifica, Gideon - Fiddleford? There are Dipper and Mabel, smiling even though the weird light from the neon highlights of the Fear-amid is reflecting off of two shining tracks down Mabel’s cheeks, and - 

Ford looks up. Stan looks back down at her, apprehension sweeping across his face even as his hand tightens in hers.

“Stanley?” Ford asks, and that’s when she realises what’s going on. “You - _you_  brought the Zodiac together?”

Stan’s expressions shifts to defensive, and he moves to pull his hand away. Ford grabs onto it instinctively, keeping her grip as she slowly climbs to her feet. “Well, it wasn’t like we had a whole buncha other options. I wasn’t just gonna let an evil triangle eat the world.” His eyes flick to the left, and he half-shrugs one shoulder like he’d really rather be scratching the back of his neck. 

“He is...gone, right? It worked?” Pacifica pipes up, from the other side of the circle. “Because, like, all we saw was a big circle of light all around us, and then your eyes, like, started glowing -”

“It was _so cool!”_ the teenager holding Ford’s right hand pipes up. Ford looks over at him, and he drops her hand like it’s a dead fish. “I mean, whatever. I’ve seen better lightshows at an Ironic Moustaches concert.” He flips his overlong bangs disaffectedly out of his eyes, and then shoots Ford a worried look. “It _did_  work though, right?”

Ford looks up at Stan.

“Yes,” she says, even though Stan refuses to meet her eyes. “Yes, it worked. You saved the world.” Stan still doesn’t look at her, but he also hasn’t let go of her hand. Ford squeezes it, with all her strength. “You saved _me_.”

The teenager beside her must have said something, or made some face, because Wendy’s voice says, “Dude, she’s _obviously_  talking to Mr. Pines.”

Finally, finally, Stan turns to look back at Ford. 

There aren’t any words that could accurately describe his expression. For a moment, it’s as though they’re children again, and the sun is setting over the water and a long day of little battles and even smaller victories, and big, big dreams.

“I, uh,” Stan says, raising his left hand to rub the back of his neck. “I didn’t wanna join him. Just so you know. Just thought I might buy you some time to get Mabel back, get this prophecy thing together. I didn’t think you’d be stupid enough to try to come rescue me -”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Ford interrupts, thinking of the blue-white eye of the portal fizzling out, its triangular frame toppling behind her. “You’re my brother.”

She looks into the deer-in-the-headlights expression Stan wears, and then, on impulse, does something that they never do. 

She lets go of Stan’s hand, and throws both her arms around his shoulders.

It takes a moment before Stan starts to relax, a moment longer before he brings up his own arms to wrap around Ford’s waist. But then he’s holding her so tight, like he’s scared she’ll disappear if he lets go, and she’s squeezing back just as hard, and Ford isn’t sure if she’s laughing or crying.

There’s a soft _thump_  as someone collides with Ford at about waist-height, and then another, and she smiles and reaches down to make sure Dipper and Mabel get caught up in the hug as well.

They only break apart when the floor gives an ominous rumble, and the roof of the Fear-amid starts to come apart brick by brick, flying away into the huge x-shaped rip in the sky.

...

As all things must, the summer comes to an end.

There’s a small crowd assembled at the bus station to see Dipper and Mabel off. Everyone has goodbyes to say, inside jokes to share, gifts to give, hugs and tears to exchange. The bus driver clears his throat impatiently, once. Then he sees the looks both Ford and Stan have levelled in his direction, and coughs nervously. He doesn’t try to hurry the twins along again.

There doesn’t seem to be enough to say, after everything that’s happened this incredible summer, after everything they’ve done. Ford’s always prided herself on her ability to wrap words around difficult scientific concepts, but emotions are another matter altogether.

She settles for placing a hand on Mabel’s shoulder and awkwardly thanking her for the sweater. “You don’t know how much it means,” she tries, but it still feels insufficient, so instead she gives Mabel’s shoulder a squeeze and then gets pulled into a hug that very nearly breaks at least one of her ribs. Mabel must have been carrying that pig around all summer. She’s _strong_.

Dipper fidgets with the cords on his new hat for a moment before he says anything to Ford. She knows what he’s thinking - or, rather, she assumes he’s thinking of the apprenticeship she’d offered him, the one he’d turned down. But - Dipper’s his own person, with his own life, in a very different world than the one Ford grew up in. Thinking she knew what he was thinking has already gotten Ford in trouble once.

So, instead, she asks. 

“It’s just - middle school,” Dipper admits, finally. He makes a face. “ _Puberty_. Demonic geometry, I can deal with, but all that?”

“It’s a whole other dimension of evil,” Ford agrees, seriously. “If you need someone to...talk to your parents...?”

Dipper smiles up at her. “I’d like that. And, y’know...if you find any really cool cryptids around Gravity Falls...”

Ford smiles back. “You’ll be the first to know.”

Stan claims to be glad to get rid of Dipper and Mabel, but he hugs them for the longest. And then they’re dashing up the bus stairs, and then they’re waving from the window as it speeds away.

And then they’re gone. 

Stan reaches out and rests a hand on Ford’s shoulder. 

“So what now?” he asks, and then, teasing, “Got any other evil ex-boyfriends squirreled away in the basement?”

Ford adjusts her glasses. “Bill wasn’t _squirreled away in the basement_ , Stanley -”

“Oh yeah? Whaddaya call that weirdo shrine, then?”

Ford is forced to concede the point.

The last puff of dust from the retreating bus vanishes into the pines, and Ford turns back towards the shack. It’s a little the worse for wear from its time as a giant robot, but she has to admit, when the townsfolk of Gravity Falls come together on a project, there’s very little they can’t do. Even somehow restore an old shack - and the heart of their town - that she’d thought damaged beyond repair.

“I don’t know what now,” she admits, and glances over at Stan. “But wherever we go from here...we go together.”

The smile that spreads across Stan’s face is wide and soft and genuine. He quickly glances away, but not before Ford catches a glimpse of telltale shimmer in the corner of his eye.

“Welp,” he says, planting his hands on his hips as he also stares back at the Mystery Shack. “Think maybe the first thing we oughtta do is burn all those creepy statues you were keeping _squirreled away in the basement_.”

Ford gives a wide, helpless smile of her own.

“Stanley,” she says, “I think you’re absolutely right.”


End file.
